


A Perfect Piece of Ass, Like Every Californian

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Birthday Sex, F/M, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Sexy Air Traffic Conducting, Threesome, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism, entirely self-indulgent PWP, lotta ball stuff here folks, smut with feelings, so i hope you like balls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-05-13 11:48:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14748270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “Happy birthday, Shane,” Sara says. “I got you a Ryan.”“Th—thanks?” Shane says. He looks at Ryan and Ryan just looks back, weirdly impassive, giving nothing away. “But I’m pretty sure I already have a Ryan in this model. What’s the return policy?”“Not like this, you don’t,” she says, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. Out of the corner of his eye Shane can see Ryan bring his hand to his mouth, stifling a snicker that he turns into a cough. Oh, he thinks.Oh shit.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I mainlined all of Ruining History the week of Shane’s birthday and things devolved quickly. This is mostly just an unbeta’d threesome smut experiment (so many limbs?), but there will likely be a chapter two that includes Meaningful Penetration because that is relevant to my interests. 
> 
> Please also note that surprise threesomes IRL are a lot like surprising someone with a puppy for Christmas: a bad idea. Don’t do it. Talk about the puppy first. Make sure you’re all ready to adopt the puppy. 
> 
> Title’s from “All the Wine” by The National.

*

The morning Shane turns 32, Sara cooks him an elaborate omelet for breakfast—three eggs, chicken sausage, cheese, mushrooms and peppers and about three different kinds of root vegetables that hipster chefs get excited about but which Shane can’t identify.

“I have a b-day surprise for you later,” she says, a little twinkle in her eye that usually means either good things for Shane or hilariously bad things for someone else. “You’ll want to keep your strength up.  Trust me.”

That seems a little ominous to Shane, but he does, after all, trust her. He scarfs the omelet happily and tries not to think about it too much.

*

Later that night, after work, Sara tosses a nicer shirt at him.

“Take a shower, birthday bum!” she says. “And be snappy about it. But, like. _Thorough_.”

“Surely I get to choose the quality and quantity of my showers on this, the anniversary of my own birth,” Shane says just to be a little difficult—he has a reputation to preserve, after all—but he’s unbothered. It’s been a good day. Word around the office is that he’s going to get the green light to start production on the second season of Ruining History any day now. Plus Sara snuck out of a meeting to make out with him for five minutes in the props closet and Ryan bought him lunch and only briefly complained about it. So overall, no complaints.

He emerges from the bathroom toweling his hair off, dressed in the button-down she picked out for him, and discovers that she’s changed too, into tighter jeans and a slightly cropped tank top that make him want to say “fuck your plans” and screw her right here on the couch instead.

“You look great,” he says. “Are we going out?”

“No, this surprise is coming to us,” she says, and then she laughs a strange little giggle at some private joke. Now that whatever’s about to happen is imminent and Shane is paying more attention, he realizes she’s nervous—she’s always fidgety just as a rule but she’s in overdrive now as she putters around the living room tidying up, pulling at a tendril of curl, coiling it around her finger, tucking it back into its little bun, and then repeating the whole process all over again. She’s glancing at her watch every 30 seconds.

“If you don’t like it—” she starts, and then stops. Her mouth clamps into a pursed little line, migrates to the left side of her face. Shane calls this her “not impressed” face because it’s usually in evidence when someone says something _really_ stupid and she’s seconds away from outright telling them so.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll love it,” Shane says reassuringly. Sara’s great at gift-giving; she always manages to come up with something creative and thoughtful and he’s sure this will be no exception.

“No, I’m serious, Shane,” she says, and she looks it. She looks at her watch again, more like a reflex than actually checking to see how much time has elapsed. “If you don’t want—if it was just talk—you have to tell me. Or just, like, pull on your ear or something and I’ll shut it down so fast.”

“Cryptic!” Shane says. He’s got a little flutter in his stomach going on now, her obvious nerves rubbing off on him more than he’ll admit. He pulls her close, bends down, and presses a little reassuring kiss to the top of her head. “Don’t worry about it, babe. You know me.”

At that exact moment there’s a knock at the door.

“Shall I get it?” Shane asks, in case Sara has a plan for this part too, but she nods. Shane swings the door open, no idea what to expect on the other side of it—but it’s Ryan. Just Ryan.

*

Well, not _just_ Ryan. He’s changed since work also, into a smart-looking short-sleeved button down that cuts right across his biceps. His hair’s a little damp, and he’s holding a bottle of something that’s sweating all over his hands and just might be champagne. And even at his very laziest, in a t-shirt with holes at the seams and gym shorts and his glasses, he’s never _just_ _Ryan_.

“Hey, man,” Shane says. He’s not really sure what’s happening here, his brain hasn’t caught up with his eyes yet. He can’t tell if Ryan’s here because he’s supposed to be here, or if he’s just dropped by unexpectedly—but the timing would be a weird coincidence, because Sara is definitely expecting something or someone. Then he thinks that maybe the champagne is Ryan’s contribution to this birthday surprise, kicking off the start of some kind of scavenger hunt or party situation.

“Happy birthday, dude,” Ryan says, holding out the bottle for Shane to take. He does so; it’s chilled but sweaty from the ride over. Ryan’s face looks a little pink, like he jogged over here, even though Shane’s sure he didn’t.

Ryan’s hanging out on the landing still, looking as uncertain as Shane feels, and Shane glances to Sara for direction. She’s got a little smile on her face, a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.

“Shane, where are your manners? Welcome our guest in, won’t you?”

Shane steps to the side and welcomes Ryan in with a flourish with the hand that isn’t clutching the champagne. He has the sneaking suspicion that the other shoe is supposed to have dropped by now. He’s supposed to know what this is, and it annoys him that he doesn’t.

“Happy birthday, Shane,” Sara says. “I got you a Ryan.”

“Th—thanks?” Shane says. He looks at Ryan and Ryan just looks back, weirdly impassive, giving nothing away. “But I’m pretty sure I already have a Ryan in this model. What’s the return policy?” 

“Not like this, you don’t,” she says, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. Out of the corner of his eye Shane can see Ryan bring his hand to his mouth, stifling a snicker that he turns into a cough. _Oh_ , Shane thinks.

_Oh shit_.

*

Shane’s pretty sure he knows when this started. It’s about four months ago, maybe five. He and Sara are in bed together, a sleepy Saturday, putting off getting up by making out lazily in a bedroom that’s getting warmer and warmer as the morning sun heats it. Shane can feel her body pressed close against his side, her curves subtle but distractingly present, but he’s still just sleepy enough that he’s not sure if he wants to commit.  

“So I had this crazy dream last night,” she says, stretching against him, pointing her toes against his calves. She says it playfully, extending the word— _craa-aaa-aaazy_.

“Yeah?” he asks, kissing his way softly down the side of her neck to her collarbone.

“We were…we brought another guy to, to bed. It was pretty hot.” Sara’s not shy talking about this kind of thing with him, but Shane notices that she’s also not _quite_ looking at him. Which is interesting.

“What, like—me and some other dude, fillin’ all your holes?” Shane says a little goofily, poking Sara in the side.

“Not exactly,” she says, and rolls her chin away from him, baring her neck in a way that suggests Shane should still be kissing it. He obliges, and starts to work one of his hands into her underwear.

“It was a lot more, ah, ah! Mutual than that.” She gasps when his middle finger finds her clit. He’d ordinarily spend a little more time warming her up, but she’s _so_ wet already. He suspects that may have more to do with Dream Shane and Dream What’s-His-Name than their lazy making out.

“Mutual, huh?” Shane asks, sliding his finger down to collect wetness and then back up to circle her clit gently. Sara’s all flushed now, hips starting to twitch rhythmically, hair a beautiful wild mess on the pillow. “Tell me about it.”

“He and I sucked you off to—oh, fuck—together. And then he fucked you while I watched, it was so hot, Shane,” she says, struggling her way through it to coherency. “If you could have seen—” 

Shane feels warm all over. He presses his erection into her hip, surprised by the effect her words are having on him. It’s not that he’s never thought about it, but Sara saying it, putting it out into the universe as a thing she might want, feels a lot more real than an occasional jerk-off fantasy ever could.

“Would you like that, baby?” he asks, running his index finger through her wetness, lightly pinching her clit between index and middle fingers so she groans in mounting desperation. He’s playing with her now, a little; if he kept to a rhythm now she’d be getting off inside thirty seconds, but sometimes the teasing is half the fun. “Did you touch yourself, watching me get nailed?”

“Stop fucking around,” she says sharply. He nips at her ear, then laughs into it when she arches up.

“Bossy,” he retorts, but he obliges with the quick, steady pressure on her clit that he knows she likes. In just a few moments she’s quivering under him, right on the edge. He slides the index and middle fingers of his other hand into the heat of her, to give her something to come around while his right works at her clit, and then she’s coming with a cry and clenching around him.

She gives him hardly any time to bask in the satisfaction of having brought her off with ruthless efficiency; a few quick breaths and she’s turning on her side, reaching out to palm his dick through his boxers.

“I’m not bossy, I’m the boss,” she says. “Jesus, you’re rarin’ to go, aren’t you?”

Just this talk, and watching her get off, has brought him a lot closer than he realized. There’s really no use denying his interest because the evidence is right there, betraying him with heavy involuntary pulses under her hand. Shane just shrugs, biting back a groan when her hand undoes the button at the fly of his boxers and slips in to stroke him.

“I’m not—opposed,” he says. “To a threesome with a guy. Hypothetically.”

“Feels like you’re a little more than ‘not opposed,’” she points out, and it’s true that Shane is rock hard in her grasp, and she rubs at the slit of his cock with one finger where wetness is gathering, pressing the tip of her finger in gently as if to prove her point.

“I’ve thought about it,” he admits. “About what it would be like.”  Sara rewards his honesty with longer strokes, and he can feel himself suddenly about to tip over the edge. He’s not sure where it came from, because not five minutes ago he was pretty take it or leave it about having sex in the first place.

“I’d love to sit on your face while some hot dude fucks your ass,” she whispers. She tightens her grip but the mental image would have been more than enough for Shane; he bucks up helplessly into her hand, seeing white behind his eyes. Then he’s coming in spurts all over her fingers, making a complete mess of his boxers and the sheets.

“Wow,” Sara says a few minutes later after they’ve cleaned up. “That was…effective.”

“Mmm,” Shane agrees. He’s still shaking off his post-orgasm haze, too chilled out to bother getting up, but he knows she’ll be antsy to get going soon. “So who was the dude in your dream? Anybody I know?”

“Nah,” Sara says, but she does look a little cagey. “Just some random I saw in the supermarket a few days ago.  Cute though.”

Shane can tell she’s lying, but it seems harmless so he doesn’t push. Everybody’s entitled to their secrets, after all. It was probably somebody embarrassing, like Mario Lopez. 

*

The truth comes out a month or two later, on a Friday night after a few drinks (more than a few). Sara’s riding him infuriatingly slowly, but Shane’s seen her get off like this and the results are so spectacular that he’s not about to complain.

“Remember that dream I told you about?” she pauses on the downstroke, grinds her clit down against his pubic bone in a way that always leaves her gasping. “About—oh God—about another guy?”

“Vividly,” Shane says, trying to keep his hips reasonably still so as not to fuck up her rhythm. “New developments?”  

“No, I just—” Sara starts, and then cuts herself off. She’s circling her hips now, fast little circles that mean she’s getting close to coming. All Shane wants in this moment is to see her come, so he just starts talking with little regard for what he’s actually saying. About whether his mouth’s writing checks his brain isn’t ready to cash.

“We could do it, if you want,” he says. “Find a guy. Together we could fuck your brains out, or—or he could fuck me. You could help him. We could eat you out together, suck his cock together, you could teach me how—what, whatever you want, I’m down for.”

He pulls Sara down to him, so her bare breasts are pressing against his chest, and puts a hand on her lower back to help her grind against him.

“Shane—” she says, shaky, “In my dream, it was Ryan.” And then she’s bearing down on him with a soft little wail, muscles clenching in fantastic little arrhythmic flutters as she comes.

And then Shane’s gripping her hips hard enough to bruise, flipping her over while she’s still spasming around him, thrusting in deep, out-of-control strokes, as deep as he can without hurting her.

He only faintly registers Sara’s breath hitch in surprise and the obscene slap of his balls against her thighs as he pulls her hips up for the best possible angle and pounds into her. In his head, a series of filthy images takes over, unbidden but not unwelcome: Ryan holding Sara up while Shane fucks her, reaching a hand down between their bodies to scratch at Shane’s stomach with his fingernails, to rub Sara’s clit. Ryan and Sara on their knees in front of him, Ryan mouthing at Shane’s dick, Sara leaning down to lick at his balls. Their fingers together on him, _in_ him.

And then he’s coming deep into Sara, hips nearly flush against hers, feeling her heart race against his chest as she whispers “Holy fuck, Shane,” and grips his back with all her strength to pull him in

He comes for what feels like an eternity but can really only be a few seconds, and then all the tension leaves his body and he rolls off Sara with a helpless little whoosh of breath that could pass for a laugh. Sara reaches down with one hand to run her fingers through the stickiness between her legs almost speculatively, a combination of her own wetness and come.

“Well, well, well,” she says. “The plot thickens.”

“Shut up, you,” he says, but without bite.  

“So…Ryan, huh?” she asks. She runs her index finger through her folds again, and then uses it to draw a sticky, transparent X on his chest. “Boy is _your_ Postmortem filming gonna be awkward on Monday.”

“Not—not like that.  You started it, bringing him up.  I would never have—”

“Yeah, but you definitely finished it. Is this, like, a thing?”

Shane thinks, for a moment, that she’s asking if it’s a thing she has to be worried about. He turns his head to look her in the eyes, afraid he’ll see hurt in them, but there’s only her usual twinkle and a hint of unfocused tipsiness.

“Sara, you know I’d never.” He tilts her chin up to kiss her, and she’s shaking her head even as she kisses him back.

“No duh, dillweed. I just mean. How long have you felt this way?” 

Shane thinks about it, really considers. If asked half an hour ago he would not have said that he had a thing for Ryan, and he would have been truthful. But Sara has this way of seeing inside him and knowing his heart when sometimes even he doesn’t, so as she puts it into words—this _thing_ —he realizes that’s exactly what it is. A Thing, capital T. A harmless crush, and a maybe-not-so-harmless something more, lying dormant under the essential cocktail of affection, respect, and playful competition that is his and Ryan’s friendship.

“Maybe a while? But Ryan’s one of my best friends, and we work together, and he doesn’t feel that way. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter because I love you.”

Sara shakes her head again more vociferously, curls flying.

“It’s possible to love more than one person, to want more than one person. It’s not a weakness, Shane. Love and sex aren’t finite resources you run out of.  Are you going to tell him?”

Shane has to think about that too. He needs to take some time with it first, for himself, because it does require an essential mental restructuring of one of the most important relationships in his life. He also thinks there’s a not-small chance that if Ryan finds out about this Thing it’ll be the end of everything they have, everything they’ve worked for: Ryan will say it’s no big deal but he’ll pull away, slowly but surely, until they’re just two guys who work together.

“No,” he says, deciding. “Not yet. I’m pretty sure it’ll fuck everything up, and for what? I’m happy. You’re happy.  He’s happy.”

“It won’t,” she says softly, and reaches up—way, way up—to run her hand through his hair, making it stick out at ridiculous fluffy angles. “He flirts back when you flirt with him. He looks at you like you hung the moon.”

“We don’t flirt!” Shane says, indignant. “That’s just the, the dynamic of the show. The bantering’s part of it.”

“Sure, okay,” Sara says with a massive roll of her eyes. “And yesterday at lunch when you went on like Tracy and Hepburn for a full five minutes about the relative merits of vinegar-based barbecue sauce versus sweet barbecue sauce and then drank half his milkshake, that was, what, rehearsal?”

Shane has no answer for that.

*

So now Ryan’s in their living room touching his mouth so much that Shane can’t think, and Sara’s leg is jiggling so fast that her jeans are making an audible swishing sound, and Shane’s just standing there holding a bottle of champagne that feels like it’s slowly melting all over his hand.

Shane wishes that somebody would speak, and he thinks it really ought to be Sara because she’s clearly gone behind his back to engineer— _something_. Instead of 32, he suddenly feels simultaneously ancient and about nineteen again, a nausea-inducing combination of petrified and turned on.

“I’m going to pour us some champagne,” he says, because the silence is killing him. “Ryan, make yourself comfortable. Sara, a hand?” He shoots her a little look that says, quite plainly, _please join me in the kitchen so I can whisper-yell at you_.

She comes with him around the corner into the apartment’s little kitchen, and Shane wishes there was an actual door there but he’ll have to make do. They don’t have champagne flutes so he pulls out three white wine glasses, tears off the foil at the top of the bottle, and looses the wire cage at the mouth to open it. As he pours he turns to Sara.

“What did you tell him?” he asks, keeping his voice low. She crosses her arms over her chest, defensive.

“He came to me, Shane. He said you were acting weird. He wanted to know if you were _mad_ at him. You were doing more harm by not talking to him than if you’d just come clean in the first place.”

“Don’t you think maybe that was my call? It’s kind of a big thing to a lay on a guy.   _Oh hey, Ryan, my boyfriend is maybe in love with you and also he wants to fuck you, let’s all fucking fall into bed together_!” Shane hisses, pouring the third glass. Ryan’s glass. The thought of Ryan out there on the couch, here for—for _that_ —makes his mouth dry, makes him want to slam his glass of champagne and immediately pour himself another.

“But I was right, he feels the same way. If you don’t want this I’ll ask him to leave, or we can all go out and watch a movie and just chill. But if you do…” she trails off meaningfully.

“Hey guys?” Ryan’s voice comes floating in from the living room. “Not to make this weirder, but you do realize I can hear everything you’re saying, right?”

Shane sighs. He grabs their glasses, squares his shoulders, and heads back out there. Ryan’s sitting there on the couch, looking smaller than usual, and Shane regrets having made him uncomfortable. He just doesn’t want to ruin this. He wants to do it right.

“I really can go,” Ryan says. “I didn’t realize.”

Shane looks at Ryan sitting there, having made a real effort in his button-down. His hair looks soft, relatively free of product, and Shane wonders what it would feel like under his hands. His arms look, well, magnificent, crossed across his chest in a way that makes the biceps stand out and which surely must be intentional. Shane realizes in that moment that under all of his fears and anxieties, he really, really doesn’t want Ryan to go.

He looks at Sara, gives her a little nod, and watches the tension fall out of her shoulders.

“No, Ryan,” she says. “Please stay. As long as you still want to.”

“I do,” Ryan says, rubbing his hands on the couch cushions. He’s saying it to the room but he’s looking right at Shane, like he knows it’s Shane who needs to hear it. Shane reaches over to hand him a glass of champagne, and as Ryan takes it he lets his fingers brush against Shane’s palm. It’s a little promise of a touch that makes Shane’s fingers twitch, makes him want to reach out and grab Ryan by both wrists, pull him in close.

“I’d like to propose a toast,” Sara says. “To the birthday boy.”

“To Shane,” Ryan says, raising his glass. Shane raises his own as well, because why the fuck not? They’re here, and he’s here, and this is going to happen, and Sara and Ryan are both looking at him with the identical intent, hot gazes that makes him feel warm all over. He wonders what else they’ve talked about.

They all drink.

*

After they’ve polished off the better part of the bottle of champagne, loosened up by their drinks and a little conversation that isn’t about fucking, Shane’s feeling a little more like himself. A little bit like he’d like for the conversation to _become_ about fucking, actually, but he isn’t sure how this is supposed to go. Surely there’s etiquette for threesomes, but he hasn’t been with anybody but Sara for going on three years now and he’s sort of forgotten how to do this part.

Something about his demeanor must shift because Sara, always perceptive to him, seems to sense that he’s ready to get the party started. 

“I think maybe Shane should get a birthday kiss,” she says. She gets up from her chair, meanders over to the couch where he’s sitting next to Ryan, and kneels on his other side. Then she’s got her hand on his neck, pulling him in to kiss him on the lips. She opens her mouth, slips him just the slightest hint of tongue, and then she’s pulling back.

“Ryan?” she says, looking over at Ryan expectantly. Ryan nods, takes a deep breath, and then he’s leaning in too, mimicking Sara’s movements. He rests two fingers behind Shane’s ear, using just a little pressure to turn Shane’s head toward him. He rests his forehead on Shane’s, just for a moment, and Shane closes his eyes in anticipation.

“Happy birthday, man,” Ryan says quietly, just for Shane, and then he’s closing the rest of the distance between them and pressing his lips to Shane’s for the first time.

Shane had forgotten, in the intervening years, how distinct a person’s kissing style can be, as personal as a signature or a fingerprint. Sara’s kisses are sweet, just a little tease of dirty when she starts getting going, and they stay sweet even when the rest of her is doing outstanding, filthy things. She usually lets Shane lead, lets him decide when to deepen the kiss and when to break it, and kissing her is as easy as breathing.

Ryan’s different. He kisses like he talks—uncertain to begin, and then a rush of nervous energy all at once, of lip and tongue and teeth, as soon as he finds his footing. Kissing him is like arguing with him: thrilling and infuriating in almost equal measure, and entirely unpredictable. Shane can’t get him to keep to a rhythm. He’s actually shaking a little, and Shane has to pull back, laughing.

“Calm down, dude,” he says, rubbing Ryan’s back, feeling the muscles there ripple a little under his shirt. “It’s not a test.”

“Shut up,” Ryan mumbles. “You don’t know, I’ve wanted this—” and then he’s diving back in to kiss Shane again, but he is a little calmer. Shane keeps rubbing his back and it seems to be settling Ryan, because he matches the pace of their kissing to that, like a metronome. Shane relaxes into it, letting himself enjoy the slide of their mouths together, the prickle at the back of his neck that he knows comes from the feel of Sara’s eyes on them.

When Shane pulls back again, he isn’t laughing. He can feel himself starting to get hard. He doesn’t want to be too eager, but he also wants to touch somebody, wants to be touched.

“How do we…?” he asks. He’s not sure if he’s asking Sara or Ryan or if he’s just asking the universe to provide direction.

“Can I just watch you two, for a little bit?” Ryan asks.

“Do you like to watch, Ryan?” Sara asks. Ryan blushes, but she’s already gamely clambering on Shane’s lap and tugging her tank top off. She’s not wearing a bra underneath and Shane finds it difficult to concentrate on anything except for her bare breasts. He has just a momentary instinctive reaction of wanting to cover her up, and then he remembers—no, Ryan’s supposed to see. She wants Ryan to see.

“Oh my God,” Ryan says faintly next to them, and Shane guesses he’s probably having the same reaction. Shane experiences a jolt of weird secondhand pride: Sara’s breasts are beautiful, small and perky with lovely, sensitive pink nipples. _Oh my God_ _is right, buddy._ Then Sara’s kissing him and Shane is reaching down to pinch a nipple between his fingers, rolling it around gently and enjoying the little hitch in her breathing it produces.

He pulls her up to him, kissing her as he plays with her nipples, and she starts to unbutton his shirt in an impressive display of multi-tasking. Once she’s got his shirt unbuttoned but not off, he lifts her up a little so he can get his mouth around her nipple. He teases and sucks until it’s stiff and then he grazes his teeth against it gently in a way that makes Sara roll her shoulders and giggle breathlessly, a delicate little shiver he can feel in his dick.

“She’s very sensitive,” Shane pulls off to tell Ryan, and Ryan just makes a little noise of assent. “In case it comes up later.” When Shane looks over, Ryan’s eyes are on his, wide and dark, and then Sara rocks down again, rubbing herself against Shane through his pants, pressing all of her weight against his erection. 

“You’re so hard for us, baby,” Sara croons. She’s been saving that one up for a rainy day, clearly, and the _us_ goes straight to Shane’s dick and forces an involuntary groan from him. Then she turns her attention to Ryan. “Ryan, don’t torture yourself. It’s okay.”

Ryan lets out a little groan to match Shane’s, and then he rolls his eyes as if to say, _fine, you win_. He lets his own hand fall into his lap to press at his own dick through his jeans. Shane wants to reach out and touch him so badly, but Ryan said he wanted to watch for now and Shane doesn’t want to rush him.

Then suddenly Sara’s up and off him, shimmying out of her jeans, standing in front of them in a pair of green briefs, a patch of wetness already showing at the crotch. If she’s nervous standing in front of them like that, being seen by Ryan, she doesn’t show it, although her cheeks are pink.

Then she’s reaching down to tug Shane’s jeans off too, and his boxers and socks along with them, and sliding down to kneel on the floor in front of him. At once he’s sitting on his couch in nothing but an unbuttoned Oxford, dick hard and red against his stomach, and Ryan’s just _staring_.

“Doing okay?” Shane asks. He reaches a hand down to stroke Sara’s cheek, just inches away from his cock.

“Y—yes,” Ryan affirms. He’s got his hand in his jeans now, but they’re tight jeans and he doesn’t look the most comfortable. Shane looks down at Sara and she looks back up at him with an expression he thinks he can decode: _let’s put on a show_.

Sara leans in and licks a slow stripe up his dick, balls to tip. She does it again, and again, and again. Every time she makes it to the tip she swirls her tongue around the head lightly, pressing it against his frenulum, and then back down again. Shane puts a big hand on the back of her head, just rests it there, playing with strands of her hair.

“You seem nervous,” Shane says to Ryan.

“No shit,” Ryan says. “I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to see this. Like you’re going to suddenly remember I’m here and tell me to leave.”

“I haven’t forgotten you’re here, Ry,” Shane says. “Not for one single second, believe me. You’re here because we want you here.”

Saying the words out loud to Ryan seems to unlock something in him, because he’s wiggling out of his clothes, leaning in to get a better look at Sara’s mouth on Shane. Shane’s mouth actually waters a little when he gets a look at Ryan’s bare arms and chest.  It’s not like he’s never seen them before, but it’s different now, knowing they’re right there on his couch, for _him_. He has to fist Sara’s hair and the arm of the couch to prevent himself from doing just that.

“Nice tits, Ry,” Shane says, and laughs when Ryan flushes. Sara gives a little snort, but she punishes Shane by pulling back so just the very tip of her tongue is lightly touching him, running up and down him in a touch so light it’s barely there.

“Sorry, this present’s unwrapping itself,” Ryan says, pulling off his grey boxer-briefs with just the briefest of hesitations before tossing them at a heap of clothing. It’s a terrible fucking line, but it doesn’t matter, because Shane cannot stop staring as Ryan gets his fist around his dick and adds, with a sigh, “Jesus, Sara, it’s his birthday. Don’t torture the man.”

“Why don’t you get down here and help me, if you’ve got so many opinions about it?” she says, and then she turns her head to the side and bites down very gently around Shane’s shaft as if to underscore her point.

 And then, fucking finally, Ryan’s sliding down to kneel next to Sara, eye-level with Shane’s cock, and Shane has to look up at the ceiling for a minute so he doesn’t pass out or do something equally humiliating.

“I haven’t done this before,” Ryan says, like a warning. Like there’s a single fucking thing he could do involving his mouth and Shane’s dick that Shane wouldn’t like.

“This might shock you, but most men aren’t all that picky,” Sara says. “The minute you get your mouth around him he’s going to lose his mind.”

“That’s weirdly reassuring,” Ryan says, rubbing his jaw with his hand absentmindedly, sizing Shane up.

Shane feels overwhelmed, suddenly, by this scrutiny, by the attention about to be paid to him, by having these two amazing people kneeling in front of him to make him feel good. It’s almost too much—not just sexually, but emotionally, which is not a reaction he expected to have right in the middle of this. His heart swells with a rush of love for them both, and gratitude.

“I’m right here, you know,” Shane says, mostly joking. He reaches down to pet Ryan’s hair, like he did to Sara, but a little less forceful, more careful. Ryan leans into the touch, pushing up into Shane’s hand, and Shane grabs the hair at the crown of his head and tugs very gently in what could only be described as a dickward trajectory.

Ryan lets himself be led, and just like that he’s opening his mouth, stretching it around the head of Shane’s cock while Sara makes encouraging sounds at his side. Shane makes a garbled, stupid little noise that makes Ryan look up at him, dick in his mouth, which in turn makes Shane make _another_ stupid noise. He’s a little worried they’re going to get stuck in a feedback loop like this, but then Ryan laughs around him and starts to take more of him, bobbing up and down in cautious little motions.

“Mmm, that’s good,” Sara says. She’s moved her hands out of Ryan’s way but she’s got one hand lightly around Shane’s balls, rubbing gently there, rolling them around in her palm as Ryan sucks. When Ryan moans around Shane, he takes a closer look, realizes she’s got her other hand around Ryan and is stroking lightly in time with his movements. He waits for the sucker punch of jealousy, seeing Sara’s hand on another man, but it doesn’t come. Shane’s got to admit they’re sort of killing this threesome thing so far.

“Look at us, we’re like a sexy Rube Goldberg machine,” Shane says, and then Ryan is pulling off him, choking a little with laughter, eyes watering, and Sara’s bent over into Shane’s thigh to muffle her helpless giggles.

“You’re far too coherent,” Sara tells him, biting lightly at the meat of his thigh, and then she’s pulling Ryan down by his neck to get his attention. “Come here, let me show you a trick.”

She takes one of Shane’s balls in her mouth, runs her tongue along it, and starts to suck steadily on it, first one ball and then the other, then pulling back to lathe her tongue over both. With her right hand she reaches up and makes a loose circle with her thumb and pointer finger, and then she slips them around Shane’s dick, right under the head, and twists lightly as she sucks on his balls.

The effect is immediate. Shane pants out a string of unimaginative curses, his hips are moving of their own accord, fucking up into Sara’s hand. It’s so good it’s almost too good, pleasure on the very verge of discomfort, and he has no idea why this drives him crazy but it always does. She follows him up as his hips buck, keeping his balls in her mouth, and after a moment or two she pulls back.

“You try,” she says, and Ryan obediently leans down to lick tentatively at the base of Shane’s dick and then down, following the seam between his balls with his tongue. He opens his mouth as wide as he can and takes both balls into his mouth, sucking gently and then, when Shane moans happily, a little less gently.

“Fuck—Ryan, that’s. Oh, _God_.”

Ryan gets the hang of it and soon he’s really enthusiastic, making Shane’s balls a slobbery mess with his mouth, reaching up with his hand to meet Sara’s on Shane’s dick. Shane’s overwhelmed with sensation, like his entire being is centered on Ryan’s mouth around his balls, like his whole world is in the heat of Ryan’s mouth and could be undone in a moment. He can feel his balls tightening, a sure sign that he’s going to come soon, and looking down at Ryan’s larger hand stroking with Sara’s smaller one on his cock is bringing that eventuality closer _so_ quickly.

“If you want me to come like this, keep going,” Shane says on the exhale, and he’s almost disappointed when Ryan pulls away, a string of saliva trailing behind him, and the hands on his cock still. But the disappointment lasts only a second because they’re not stopping, just swapping positions as if by some unspoken agreement.

Sara leans down to suck at his balls, taking up Ryan’s position, and Ryan drops a kiss to the underside of Shane’s dick, just under the head, and lets his tongue linger there.

“I want you to come in my mouth, if that’s okay,” Ryan says, wiping his mouth. His lips are shiny and a little swollen, kind of mesmerizing. “It’s. I’ve. It’s something I’ve wanted.”

“If that’s _okay_?” Shane asks faintly. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ryan.”

Then he realizes that Ryan and Sara must have talked about this, beforehand. He’s going to jerk off to that one for sure: the two of them, sharing their secrets about him. Sara telling Ryan what Shane likes; Ryan confessing what he’s imagined, how he wants to get Shane off. What he thinks about at night in his bed, hand around his own cock.

These two. They’re going to fucking kill him.

“Help me out here,” Ryan says to Shane, and when Shane just looks at him blankly Ryan grabs Shane’s hand and places it on the back of his own head with a roll of his eyes. “C’mon, dude. I know you weren’t born yesterday, just fucking—”

Shane realizes with a shudder, gripping his fingers around the crown of Ryan’s head, that Ryan wants him to take control. He wants to oblige—Ryan has a vision for this, clearly, something he’s pictured in his head—but it feels like a lot of responsibility over something fragile and new.

He leads Ryan’s head down on him and then makes a fist of his hair, pulling him back up and almost off his dick, and then back down again. He’s not forcing, just setting a rhythm that’s just a little faster and harsher than what Ryan was accomplishing on his own. Ryan hollows his cheeks out, creating blissful suction, and then Shane’s holding his head steady and fucking up into his mouth, hot and perfect. Sara pulls away from his balls to watch, and Shane thinks she’s got a hand around Ryan’s dick again from the way he’s gone a little wriggly and frantic, but he can’t be sure because his vision’s gone blurry at the edges.

It’s all too much—Ryan’s mouth stretched around his cock, and the noises he’s making every time Shane fucks up, and Sara’s eyes hot on them, watching them together. It feels like his chest is going to burst with his feelings for them both, for this woman that he’s loved for so long, who knows him so well. For this man who insinuated himself in Shane’s life and grew on him so insistently that loving him feels like a natural evolution of their _them_ -ness.

Shane never, ever thought he could have them both.

“Ryan, I’m gonna—” he says, and Ryan murmurs “Mmm-hmm” around him, and then Shane is coming down Ryan’s throat, doing his very best not to lose control and choke him. Sara’s stroking his stomach through it, his abs clenching involuntarily with the intensity of it, and she’s saying something but he can’t hear her.

Ryan pulls off him, swallowing and looking pretty fucking pleased with himself, hair all over the place like he just woke up. Sara bends over to kiss Shane’s stomach, just below his belly button.

“Wowza,” she says. “You guys don’t even know how hot that was. Fuck.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Ryan croaks, and then he widens his eyes a little at how wrecked his voice sounds, like he’s only just realizing what he did.  He’s shifting around on his knees. Shane realizes that both he and Sara have been down there a while, and that neither of them have gotten off yet, they’ve been so focused on him.

“Get up here,” Shane says. He just wants to kiss them both silly and watch them come apart, show them with his hands and his mouth how lucky he is. That privilege, he thinks, might be the best birthday present he’s ever been given.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara settles behind Ryan, pressing her breasts into his back, making him inhale and refocus. She wraps her arms around him in a little hug from behind and scratches her fingernails up his thighs.
> 
> “Are we about to Ghost this dude’s asshole right now?” Ryan asks. “Alexa, play Unchained Melody.”
> 
> “ _This dude’s asshole_?” Shane’s indignant. “Like I’m some random you guys picked up in a bar? I’m the reason for the season, baby!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I believe y'all were promised some meaningful bottoming, and I'm a woman of my word. This is still just PWP with a healthy soupçon of feelings.

Shane had been a little worried that coming so early in the night would make him sleepy and useless, ruin him for further fun, but it’s exactly the opposite. He’s wide awake, blood pounding in his ears, fingers twitchy with the need to touch and be touched.

Sara and Ryan slither up the couch to bracket him on either side like a set of attentive, impossibly sexy bookends. Ryan pushes into his side, just a little, pressing his erection into Shane’s hip. Shane lets his hand trace down Ryan’s stomach.

“Not to be crude,” Sara says, “but if I’m going to continue self-lubricating so spectacularly we should probably rehydrate.”

“Self-lubricating,” Ryan snickers. “Like she’s an engine.”

“Yuk it up, buddy,” Shane says. He reaches down between Sara’s thighs; she bucks against him, and his fingers come away slick and shining.  Without giving Ryan warning or time to think about it, Shane raises his fingers to Ryan’s mouth and presses in.

Ryan’s mouth closes around his fingers like an instinct, sucking the taste off them, and when Shane pulls his fingers back Ryan chases them like he wants more. He presses a shuddering kiss to Shane’s palm and then bites gently into the meat of his hand.

Sara hops up from the couch, and Shane and Ryan watch her round the corner into the kitchen, giving a little wiggle of slim hips just for them. Shane can hear her rooting around in the cupboard for a glass.

“I’m still having a little trouble accepting that this is really happening to me,” Ryan says.

Shane reaches down to run a sticky finger up the length of Ryan’s erection, wrapping his hand around him for a tentative, experimental squeeze. Ryan’s whole body curls around his hand like a comma to keep him there, all bent-in shoulders and knees, and Shane revels in the press of Ryan’s thighs against his forearm.

“How about now?” Shane asks, and Ryan huffs into his upper arm, somewhere between a laugh and a cut-off little moan.

“You two should be hydrating too!” Sara’s voice comes floating in from the kitchen, and Shane reluctantly pulls his hand away. He stands, dragging Ryan to his feet to join Sara.

“Mustn’t keep the lady waiting.”

*

In the stark fluorescent light of the kitchen, Ryan’s naked presence in Shane’s home is even more unbelievable, almost dreamy it its unlikelihood. He’s leaning back against the counter staring frankly at Sara’s body as she pours them both a glass of water from the Brita pitcher, taking her in like he’s afraid he won’t get another chance.

Watching Ryan’s throat work as he gulps his water down and remembering how he came down it not ten minutes ago, Shane knows the feeling.

The kitchen’s too small for all three of them, somehow. Ryan’s biceps are taking up more of their fair share of the space. Shane can tell Ryan’s working himself up to something by the speculative look on his face and the way he swishes water around in his mouth.

Ryan finishes chugging his glass of water and sets the glass in the sink, a polite houseguest if ever there was one. Then he lifts Sara by the waist and deposits her on the kitchen counter like she weighs nothing, spreading her legs and stepping between them. Shane smiles at her shriek of surprised laughter and leans back to watch the show.

“You’re a show-off,” Shane says, and Ryan just shrugs like he’s knows it’s true.

“She likes this?” Ryan asks Shane, leaning down to carefully bite her nipple between his teeth, sucking to soothe it right after. Sara’s head falls back to bump against the cabinet, hard enough to notice but not enough to hurt.

“What do you think?” Shane nods his head at Sara, who’s panting into her elbow. Ryan doesn’t need his permission—he already has Sara’s—but he doesn’t seem to realize that. He keeps checking in with Shane, sidelong nervous glances like he thinks Shane will change his mind and sucker punch him. “Man, I know you know how to do _this_.”

Ryan smiles sheepishly and then he’s sliding his hand up Sara’s thigh and between her legs, cupping her gently, separating the folds of her to rub her clit with the pad of his thumb. Shane cranes his neck to see, waiting again for jealousy to hit him—but it doesn’t. They’re too breathtakingly hot together to leave room for anything but awe and hunger. He wants to be both of them, to have both of them, and watching them have each other is almost as good.

“How does it feel, babe?” Shane asks. Sara and Ryan both start to answer him at once, and Shane has to put down his water glass to laugh, his heart beating harder with fondness. “Sara, then Ryan,” he delegates in a businesslike tone when he’s done laughing, like they’re in a meeting and deciding who will share their project updates first.

“It feels like we’re gonna have to bleach this counter after,” she says. “I…oh, oh, _fuck_.”

Ryan’s distracted her from answering by sliding two fingers inside her, crooking them just so, and she spreads her legs further, scooting her body so she’s hanging off the edge of the counter.

“I can feel the calluses,” she says. “From the, the stupid guitar. In me. Shane—”

Ryan pulls back from her nipple with a little _pop_ , doing something with his fingers that makes Sara squirm and yelp. “It’s not stupid, it’s _therapy_! How many times—”

“You teaching Shane how to plunk out the intro lick to ‘Day Tripper’ while I’m trying to draw isn’t therapy, it’s torture,” Sara shoots back.

Shane’s enjoying the talk, but he’s also ready to see some orgasms. He can feel his own dick starting to stir to attention again; it’s too soon for him to be ready to go again, but his body’s thinking about it, lumbering back to life under this onslaught of sights and sounds. 

“Ryan?”

“She’s so wet,” he says hoarsely. Shane knows it so keenly he can almost feel her under his own fingers; he can hear it, the slick wet sound of Ryan’s fingers moving in and out of her. He can smell her too, the scent of sex strong in the small kitchen, but he thinks it might be creepy to say so.

“She’s wet for _you_ ,” Shane says, low, walking over to rest his chin on Ryan’s shoulder and get a better view. Ryan shivers when Shane pushes up against him, still not all the way hard but well on his way. “You’ve got my girl so hot for you, she’s practically begging for it.”

Ryan bites his lip and tucks his red face away from Shane to hide how much he likes that, and Sara snorts.

“You’re both cavemen,” she says, wriggling her hips down on Ryan’s hand. “I can’t believe there are so many tongues in this room right now in perfect working order and none of them are doing anything useful.”

Ryan doesn’t have to be told twice. He drops like an anchor, going into a crouch on the floor of the kitchen. Shane makes himself useful, holding Sara’s legs spread for her, watching with glazed-over eyes as Ryan begins to eat her out.

He’s clearly pretty great at it, because it’s only a couple of minutes before Sara’s shaking in that familiar way that Shane knows means she’s close. He leans down again for a better look, watching Ryan suck at her clit with careful pressure and then pull back to press the flat of his tongue over her over and over.

“Why, Ryan, you’re an artist.”                                       

Ryan glances up at him and flips him off without stopping.

“Flip me off all you want,” Shane says, struck by a sudden fit of brilliance. “But…hmm, how do I put this? Until Sara’s come at least three times, you don’t come. It’s her, you know, her finder’s fee. So maybe a little more focus on your part.”

Ryan wheezes with muffled laughter and Sara sits up straighter, squeezing around Ryan’s ears and swatting at his head.

“Did you just wheeze _in me_? Un-fucking-believable. _Threesomes are so great_ , they said. _It’ll be so sexy_ , they said. _Treat you like a queen_ , they said—”

“Who’s this ‘they’?” Shane asks, as Ryan redoubles his efforts on Sara’s clit, making her abandon her train of thought. He slides his middle finger back into her and in no time at all she’s coming with a squeak and a long, happy sigh, Shane bracing her with a hand on the inside of either shaking thigh.

It is, he thinks, exquisite teamwork. Ryan pulls back, his mouth and chin wet, and wipes his face with the back of his forearm. Shane wants to put it in the Louvre.

*

After Sara’s got her legs back and hopped off the counter, they finish off the Brita pitcher’s worth of water and the last of the champagne. Shane can’t remember the last time he was casually naked around their apartment this much. He feels like a proper hedonist, standing here in his kitchen—his _kitchen_ , where he prepares _food_ —watching Ryan support himself against the oven with one strong arm while slowly stroking himself with the other.

“I think I’d like to head to the bedroom now,” Shane says. It’s starting to sink in that this is real, that this is happening for him, that he’s allowed to ask for things. He bets that Sara’s got some thoughts too; in fact he knows it, and he lets himself page through the smutty collection of things she’s told him over the last few months. He bookmarks one, in his head—if Ryan will. If he wants—

Sara swats Ryan’s hand away from his own dick and leads them into the bedroom.

“She’s like a sexy air traffic controller,” Shane says to Ryan, watching her direct them onto the king-sized bed. “You know, the dudes with the fluorescent vests waving the glowsticks around who makes sure the planes don’t crash into each other on the runway?”

“Oh thanks a lot—”

“I said _sexy_!”

Sara shakes her head, curls flying everywhere, as she pushes him down on to the bed and climbs on top of him. He groans when she rubs herself against him, slick with her own wetness and Ryan’s spit, and then again louder when she reaches down to slip him inside her. 

“That escalated quickly,” Ryan says from up by Shane’s head.

“She’ll get off fast like this,” Shane says. “So it’s good for you.”

“It’s _all_ good for me.” Ryan sounds dazed, stunned into stupidity by the sight of Sara rocking herself on Shane’s dick, grinding down the way she likes. He’s got his hand on his dick again. “Jesus, that’s a lot of dick for not a lot of girl.”

“Mmhm, he’s _big_ ,” she says, locking eyes with Ryan off of Shane’s right shoulder. “You like that, Ry? Thinking about that? You want to feel it in you, maybe, some time?”

“Jesus Christ,” Shane and Ryan mutter in unison. Flustered, Ryan pulls his hand off himself and shoves it in his armpit like he’s burned his hand. Shane realizes with the very tiny part of his brain still devoted to thinking that Ryan was close, too close, about to come just thinking about it—and that Ryan himself doesn’t know what to do with that yet.

Sara knows it too, and she smells blood; she leans back, bracing her arms behind her, making it easier for Ryan to see her sliding down, down, all the way down on Shane.

“Does that get you off, Ryan, thinking about sitting on his cock like this?”

“I—I don’t—”

“Sara,” Shane says, a low warning, and he reaches down for her clit to distract her. She’s like a dog with a bone sometimes, and she’ll wreck Ryan on the rocks of his own hang-ups if she isn’t careful.

“Yeah, okay,” she says. She rides him harder until she comes again, trapping his hand between her thighs to keep it there and clenching around him in a way that makes him supremely grateful he’s already come once tonight. She pushes herself off him with a pleased-sounding _hmm_ , toppling into Ryan’s legs.

Shane looks over to see that Ryan’s stretched out on his stomach, face pressed into Shane’s own pillow. _Oh no, we fucked it up_ , he thinks, but then Ryan’s turning his face back over to look up at Shane, eyes bleary and face red.

“I can’t look directly at you guys, it’s like staring right at the sun,” he croaks. “It’s—I can’t, I’m not.”

Shane’s still breathing a little heavy, but he leans over to kiss Ryan as gently as he can because Ryan’s starting to look the way Shane’s starting to feel: overwhelmed. Ryan’s breath catches in his throat as he leans into the soft touch. As Shane pulls away Ryan sighs, calmer already.

Sara’s peachy keen, of course, but that’s her all over.

“What do you want, birthday boy?” she asks Shane.

“I want a party with roomfuls of laughter,” Shane sings under his breath, just to make Ryan laugh and loosen up again.

“Don’t care how, you want it now?” Ryan asks, grinning over at him, always easy for a movie reference.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but…” Shane lets himself trail off.  He shoots Sara a quick look and she raises her eyebrows back at him. Shane’s not sure how to ask for this without giving Ryan a panic attack, which maybe means he shouldn’t ask at all, but he wants it. He wants it so much.

“Do you want Ryan to fuck you, baby?” Sara croons, picking up what he’s laying down, reaching out to rub Ryan’s back and shoulders where they’re tense. “Want to feel him slide into you? Want me to show him how to make you come all over yourself?”

“Where do you find women like this?” Ryan asks him, too incredulous to even be embarrassed. “I have dated so much, you wouldn’t believe, and—”

“I mean, consider Buzzfeed,” Shane says with a shrug. “But yeah. Ryan, if you’re into it, I’d love to get fucked. No pressure, though.”

Ryan’s mouth opens and closes like a surprised goldfish for a full ten seconds, and then he plops back down face-first into the pillow. Shane shoots a look at Sara, concerned, but she just shakes her head at him. She holds up her hand, all five fingers spread apart. She tucks her thumb in (four) and then her pinky (three), ring finger (two), middle finger (one), and points to Ryan with her pointer finger, and—

“Oh my god, yes,” Ryan says, his voice muffed around the pillow.

*

Sara maneuvers them around the bed so naturally they don’t even realize she’s doing it until Shane’s laid out flat on his back and Ryan’s kneeling between his legs, looking down at him with stunned eyes, his pupils blown wide with arousal and a healthy amount of trepidation. For a moment, Shane has an out-of-body experience; he feels like he’s floating above himself, watching Ryan watch him.

He imagines trying to explain this situation to Shane of one year ago, freshly-thirty-one Shane, and he comes up blank. Ryan of a year ago was so mind-blowingly different that even if he could believe it of himself, he’d never have believed it of Ryan. Sara was different too, much shyer.

Last year for his birthday she got him _concert tickets_ , so in terms of experience presents this one’s a little more immersive and personalized.

He wonders how this will work. It has the potential to become like Tetris, endless permutations of parts slotting into bits, and he worries he’ll be in his head so much trying to puzzle it out that he’ll accidentally miss it all.

Ryan reaches down to pet Shane’s leg, rubbing a little absent-minded circle into a long pale expanse of thigh with his thumb. Sara’s gone digging for supplies, condoms and lube and toys, if they want them, and Shane can hear her rooting around in their bedside table. Ryan’s eyes dart away from Shane’s face to watch her.

“We really, _really_ don’t have to,” Shane says. “I’m happy with this. I’d be happy with anything.”

Ryan swallows. “I do want to, is the thing. I’m just worried that I’ll—I don’t know, be bad at it. Hurt you.”

Sara sits back on her heels, a bottle of lube in one hand and a frankly unnecessary number of condoms in the other.

“He’s only got the one dick, Sar.”

“Don’t you lecture me about who’s-got-how-many-dicks,” Sara says, slapping Shane on the arm. “Nobody likes a backseat driver.”

To Ryan she says, much more sweetly, “You’re not going to be bad at it, and he’s not some blushing virgin. I’ll help you figure it out.”

Ryan’s eyes dart between them, lip caught between his teeth for a moment until his curiosity makes him stop worrying at it.

“You guys do, um, do that? Do you have, like, a rockin’ strap-on in there?”

“Wouldn’t _you_ like to know.”

She doesn’t have one, actually, although she’s not shy about whipping out the butt stuff for special occasions. Her fingers aren’t large even when she’s got three of them in him, but Shane can tell she’s trying to calm Ryan’s nerves by pretending like this is old hat.

Sara settles behind Ryan, pressing her breasts into his back, making him inhale and refocus. She wraps her arms around him in a little hug from behind and scratches her fingernails up his thighs.

“Are we about to Ghost this dude’s asshole right now?” Ryan asks. “Alexa, play Unchained Melody.”

“ _This dude’s asshole_?” Shane’s indignant. “Like I’m some random you guys picked up in a bar? I’m the reason for the season, baby!”

“Okay, I’m playing Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers!” Alexa announces, as perky as ever. The song starts to play, and Sara howls with laughter.

_Whoa, my love, my darlin’, I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time…_

“Alexa, stop right this minute!” Shane barks.

“Okay!” she chirps. The song stops. Shane turns his head to snort into the pillow.

Sara just laughs again into Ryan’s shoulder, shaking her head, and lets her hands meet around his body, stroking his dick with one hand and his belly with the other. Ryan moans, and Shane’s impressed he’s keeping it together as well as he is. He and Sara have both gotten off at least once tonight, and Ryan’s barely even been touched; he must be going up the wall with it. Shane’s determined to show him a good time.

But first he’s determined to lie back and watch Sara’s clever hands uncap the lube and drizzle some all over Ryan’s cock, all over Ryan’s hand. She starts to work him over properly, and soon he’s a wriggling mess, leaning back into her body and shifting from knee to knee.

“Sara, you have to stop or I’ll—”

Sara stops abruptly, running her slick hands over Ryan’s, getting his fingers lubed up.

“Okay, now you just…”

She guides his hand down below Shane’s balls, lower, lower, helps him oh-so-carefully press up and in with the tip of a finger. Ryan’s eyebrows furrow into such a look of intense concentration that Shane would be laughing if he wasn’t otherwise occupied.

Ryan’s finger slides into him, a slow agony, and Shane’s concerns about being too in his own head just…disappear. Like so much dust in the wind.

“Guh,” he huffs out, and Ryan’s eyes are snapping back up to his face.

“Too much?”

“Too—no. No, that was a good noise.”

“Right,” Ryan mutters, and then he’s committing, leaning forward to press a kiss to Shane’s bent knee as he pushes in as deep as he can go and withdraws again.

Ryan does it over and over again, building up a rhythm, Sara whispering in his ear as he goes, things Shane can’t quite make out. He wonders if she’s spitting back at Ryan all the things Ryan told her privately, recounting whatever shared fantasy they tested out together when they made this arrangement in the first place. Or maybe she’s telling Ryan Shane’s own fantasies, about how hard he came just from Sara saying Ryan’s _name_ in bed.

“He can take more,” she says, clearly enough for Shane to hear her, and she aims a glint of teeth his way.

Ryan pulls back, and Shane doesn’t even have time to complain about the absence of touch before he’s back with a second finger, stretching Shane open on them in a methodical, surprisingly patient way. Shane doesn’t think of Ryan as patient, particularly, but his hand is shaking with restraint now.

“That’s, oh, uh,” Ryan says.

“Here’s a thing,” Sara says, very casual, like she’s not giving Ryan the keys to unlocking all of Shane’s stupidest noises. “If you crook your fingers up towards you, like you’re making air quotes—just feel for a spot that feels different and, you know, touch it a bunch.”

Ryan obeys; Shane shifts down with his hips, squirming on Ryan’s fingers, eager to help Ryan find what he’s looking for. They all know immediately when he finds it because Shane’s hips buck up, out of his control, and then back down in a quick grind on a very surprised Ryan’s hand. He lets out a low groan that must not sound entirely like pleasure, because Ryan’s fingers stop seeking.

“Are you okay?”

“Another good noise, why are you like this?” Shane hisses, on the verge of hysteria, tilting his pelvis up to make Ryan move again.

“What, seeking explicit consent while shoving half my hand up my best friend, who until today I had never even _kissed_? Gee, Shane, I don’t know, why would anyone—”

“ _Oh_ -kay,” Sara butts in. “You’re both impossible. Ryan, just keep touching him like that, I promise you’ll like the show.”    

Instead of doing that, Ryan withdraws his fingers. He reapplies lube and then he presses in again with a third, and it’s _so much_ and Shane’s brain trips and falls over itself and then mostly stops operating altogether. Sara lets out a surprised little laugh, but whether at the look on his face or Ryan’s sudden defiance, Shane doesn’t know.

“You can take that, right, big guy?” Ryan asks, and something in his tone brings Shane back again. Makes him pay attention.

“Yes, I—oh God.”

“Yes what?”                                                   

“Oh, _interesting_ ,” Sara murmurs, sounding impressed.

“Is this a ‘please, sir, may I have some more’ kind of thing? Don’t get me wrong, I’m into it, I just need to know what we’re—”

“Touch him, Sara. Help me shut him up,” Ryan says. He does something with his fingers, separating them inside Shane, stretching impossibly even as at least one finds that spot again to rub with purpose. Shane can’t remember ever feeling this full, this overwhelmed.

“Look who suddenly knows so much,” Sara shoots back, but she doesn’t look mad about it either. She reaches around Ryan to grab Shane with a lube-covered hand. The pace she sets is slow, her grip not so tight, but combined with Ryan’s fingers inside him it’s perilously close to too much.

“Sara,” Shane warns, low under his breath, and she makes a very tight circle at the base of his cock with her fingers to inhibit the quickly oncoming rush of his orgasm. It pulls his body up short, like a train hitting a foreign object on the tracks and jackknifing in on itself.

“Not so fast, mister,” she says. “We’ve got plans for you.”

Ryan pulls his fingers out then, and surveys Shane laid out in front of him. Shane looks back, feeling raw with how much he wants this, almost embarrassed. Not by the act itself, but by how much he wants Ryan this way, and how studiously he would have avoided ever confronting that if Sara hadn’t deliberately pushed them together like her own personal Ken dolls.

Ryan swallows hard. Sara’s sliding a condom on him, slicking him up again, attending to all the logistical details so the two of them can have this moment together, before.

“You’re so good together, the two of you,” Ryan says to Shane. “You know each other like the back of your hands. It’s really intimidating to have sex with two people who are already so good at having sex with each other.”

“It’s not a competition,” Shane says. “That’s how people see you and me, you know, when they watch the show. They think we’re seamless. You’re a fast learner, you’ll catch up.” 

It’s the first time any of them has suggested that this might have legs beyond tonight, that it might be an arrangement that reshapes their lives going forward in some fundamental way. Shane can hear from Sara’s little intake of breath that it’s not lost on her. Ryan looks down at him, big dark eyes too wide in his face, like how he looks when he’s scared, but also not at all like that. Shane thinks Ryan recognizes an invitation when he hears it.

Ryan leans down, bends over him for a deep kiss, grateful and seeking and hot all at once. The push of their naked bodies together for the first time ignites something in Shane that sucks away his ability to joke his way through this; suddenly he’s dead serious.

He pulls away, cups the back of Ryan’s neck with his hand.

“Come on, I need it,” he says, because _I need you_ still feels like a lot.

“Come on, you need it, _what_?”

“Please,” Shane croaks, and Ryan nods, presses a wet kiss into his throat just above his Adam’s apple, and pulls himself back. This thing between them is shifting and changing all the time; it’s already something Shane doesn’t quite recognize, even though he helped build it.

“Wow,” Sara says softly. She’s touching herself, knees spread wide on the bed to let anybody see who might be interested in that kind of thing. Ryan catches sight of her and almost falls off the bed.

“Everybody’s got to stop distracting me,” he says. “I want to do this right and I can’t focus when you’re all—making plans and, and touching yourselves. _Honestly_.”

Sara hauls herself up to help Ryan get situated again, or maybe just to be there for moral support. It’s not like he needs the guidance now. He slips his fingers down to make sure Shane’s still ready, and then he’s sliding in to the hilt in one slow, continuous motion.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Shane chokes out. He’s ready so it doesn’t hurt; it’s just so much more than he was expecting and nothing he could really prepare for. Ryan doesn’t move, he just stays fully-seated, propped up over Shane, staring down at him like Shane’s wide-open face will tell him what to do next.

“You can move,” Shane says a moment or two later, on an exhale.

Ryan nods again and then he’s pulling out, very slowly, very carefully, and sliding home again. He may not have experience at this but he’s been trained, well-trained, by some woman or another somewhere along the way. He knows to watch for physical cues, for enthusiasm, for lack of it. His eagle-eyed attention is sexier than almost anything Shane’s ever known.

He gives it to Shane good and slow, frustratingly slow, and then he says: “Sara, do the thing.”

“Aye aye, captain!” Sara says, chipper, with a snap of her hand in salute, even though absolutely everyone in this room knows that _she’s_ the captain. “With relish.”

Sara’s moving up the bed now, next to Shane. She kisses him and then whispers, “Permission to come aboard?”

“Granted,” he says.

She straddles him on the pillow, facing Ryan, toward the foot of the bed, and then slowly sinks down against his mouth. They’ve done this too, plenty of times, but never while something else fairly mind-blowing was also happening to Shane’s body.

He worries, as he licks up into the heat of her, that he’ll explode with it, that no one person is allowed to experience this much pleasure. Maybe he’ll drown like this, nose-deep in her wetness. What a way to go.

Ryan pulls back a little to give her room to lean down. She reaches out to brace herself against his big shoulders—Shane can only sense it happening, impeded as his vision is. He can see it in his mind’s eye, the three of them making a beautiful scalene triangle, sides of inequal length, holding each other in balance.

“You better make her come fast, buddy,” Ryan warns. “I’m a mere mortal, I can’t—”

Sara presses down onto Shane’s face, against his nose and mouth. He brings his hands up to hold her open for him, to help support her where her legs are starting to go weak against the ministrations of his tongue.

“C’mon, Sar, don’t be gentle,” he rasps when she lifts herself, and she grinds down properly this time. This is take-no-prisoners Sara, the one who usually comes out after three glasses of wine and can’t be bothered to control herself.

He can tell she’s close by the way her thighs tighten around his head, by how she stops paying such close attention to his breathing and just trusts him to let her know with a tap if he needs a break. He licks her clit how she likes it, and then she’s moving too fast for him to keep up and he just flattens his tongue to let her bring herself off against it.

The minute she’s done coming, Ryan gets serious. He must have taken Shane’s threat about Sara’s finder’s fee as gospel, because that was three and Ryan’s clearly done being patient. His hips snap faster, deeper and he pushes Shane’s knees up towards his chest to get the angle he wants.

“Slide off, Sara, when you can?” he asks, his voice thick and unfamiliar. _This is what he sounds like when he’s close_ , Shane realizes. He’s asking Sara to get up so he can see Shane’s face as he fucks him into the headboard, and that’s about the most stupidly romantic thing Shane’s ever heard.

“Disembarking,” Sara says, hooking her leg back around to fall face-down on the bed next to them. Ryan waits for her to curl herself around Shane’s body, fitting herself into all the nooks and crannies of his side, a warm grounding presence. Then he bends Shane nearly in half, almost more than Shane’s body naturally wants to go, and goes to _town_.

Shane doesn’t want to be a starfish, he wants to give as good as he’s getting, but he can’t do much more than arch his back for show and clench around Ryan and take it. He reaches up for Ryan’s shoulders, around to his upper back, and lets his own surprised, pleased noises spill out.

Ryan grunts then, loud, not unlike his dumb exercise noises, but they don’t sound dumb here. They sound _earned_ , and Shane wants to collect every one of them and put them behind glass and treasure them. He’ll definitely tease Ryan for them later, do a loud meathead imitation for Sara’s enjoyment, but now in this moment they just ricochet around between his ears and slide down his spine to his dick.

He feels full. Both in the very literal, very physical sense, where it’s like Ryan’s so deep in him with every push in that Shane can feel him in his stomach, but also—he’s just _full_. He’s not sure he’s ever felt this much all at once, and all of it crucial and imperative.

“Is it, is this good?” Ryan asks, starting to lose his breath with the exertion, starting to come undone by degrees, visibly affected by every single stroke. “Do you like it?”

The chisel-voiced, demanding Ryan, whatever character he was briefly putting on for Shane and Sara’s enjoyment earlier, has faded away again. This is the Ryan he knows, the one who seeks reassurance only because he cares so very deeply about the outcome, because he can’t bear to be a disappointment.             

Shane almost doesn’t know how to reply, but only because he doesn’t have the words for how much he likes it. The enormity of the response required to answer such a simple question makes him laugh. Sara understands, and she pets his side with her fingers.

“He likes it,” she says softly.

“Shane?” Ryan asks again, his voice breaking and crackling. He stops moving, pushing in as far as he can and just _staying there_ , maybe because he’s close and maybe because he’s giving Shane a minute for his brain to take the reins from his body.

“It’s good,” Shane says, low and hoarse. “Ryan, it’s, you’re, it’s so good, don’t—”

Ryan exhales, like that was what he needed.

“Help me, I don’t have enough hands,” he says to Sara. She rises up on her knees and takes Shane’s dick in her hand, and then Ryan is moving again, _thank fucking god_.

Sara’s hand on him again, the speed of Ryan’s pace as he hurtles toward his own orgasm, tip Shane over the edge so fast his head spins with it. He can’t even really warn them; he just comes all over his stomach and around Sara’s fingers, heaving a noise between a sigh and a moan into the crook of his elbow.

Sara strokes him through it, murmuring encouraging little noises. Shane’s dimly aware of Ryan licking his lips, like he remembers the taste.

“How do you wanna come, Ry?” Shane asks, when he can speak again. Ryan’s head snaps up, like he’s shocked by the question, like he hadn’t considered that there were options.

“I…like this?” he asks, a little tentative. “Just like this, if you’re okay.”

“Man, I’m more than okay. Do it,” Shane says.

He reaches up to pull Ryan down to him, unheeding the mess on his stomach. Sara slips her hand out from between them as Ryan surges down to kiss him—like he means it, like he really means it. Shane pours all of his _fullness_ into the kiss, hoping Ryan will get the message.

“God,” Ryan punches out, one sharp syllable close to Shane’s ear, and then he comes pressed as deep into Shane as he can get, shoulders shaking.

They all lie there breathing heavily together for a moment. Ryan pulls back to get a look at Shane’s face, but he doesn’t pull out. He looks, Shane thinks, entirely without guile, an open book for them to page through at will.

Sara reaches out to push Ryan’s hair off his sweaty forehead, and he tucks his chin into the palm of her hand.

“And _scene_ ,” Shane says when he can’t bear to be left alone in the quiet with his feelings any more. The seriousness of Ryan’s face cracks wide open with the force of the smile that blossoms brightly from underneath.

Ryan pulls out very carefully, ties off the condom and tosses it in the wastebasket by the bin.

“I’ve gotta pee,” Sara announces, scrambling off the bed like she’s trying to beat Ryan or Shane to the bathroom, even though they’ve barely moved. “Or I’ll get a U-T-IIIIIIII!” they hear her announce in a singsong voice to the hallway.

“Very sexy,” Ryan says. “Good to keep the mystery alive.”

“Gynecological health is important, Ryan,” Shane says, with the knowledge of one who’s been in a long-term relationship with an over-sharer for nearly three years. “Spend enough time with that woman naked and you’ll know more about it than third-year med students. Just you wait.”

It’s another invitation, and not a very subtle one. Ryan flops down next to Shane, on his side. Shane always assumed Ryan would be squirrely about nudity, but it turns out that here in the golden afterglow he doesn’t give a shit.

They lie that way, in the quiet, for a few minutes, listening to Sara putter around in the bathroom and run the taps and flush the toilet, attending to mysterious lady-rituals.

Shane steals another appreciative look. Something tells him that it isn’t the last time, that he’ll have chances on chances on chances to learn everything about Ryan’s body that he wants to know, but. Just in case.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Ryan says.

“Dangerous to say that in a room full of video producers with very active Instagram accounts,” Sara says from the doorway. She takes a running leap onto the bed, curls flying everywhere when she lands at their feet.

“What would happen if you filmed a sex tape with a vampire?” Ryan wonders out loud. “Like, they don’t show up in pictures, right? Does that also go for video?”

“The _Buffy_ canon is inconclusive on this issue,” Sara says.

“I mean, vampires aren’t real, so there’s that. Why, do you want to film a sex tape with a vampire, Ry?” Shane adopts an exaggerated Transylvania-by-way-of-Bela-Lugosi accent. “Vant to geet your blood sucked by a tall, strapping metaphor for penetration?”

“You’re not that strapping,” Ryan mutters, which isn’t exactly an answer but is revealing nonetheless.

Sara reaches out with her foot to nudge at Shane’s calf. He feels the flutter of her toes, whisper-soft, and catches her eye. He knows then that it’s okay to venture out onto this ledge, that she’ll be there with him.

“I’ll put ‘ravished by Shane in a vampire costume’ on the list,” Shane says. “For a special Halloween treat, maybe. You can wear a filmy white nightdress and shriek very loudly.”

He sees Ryan understand his true meaning, sees it at close range as Ryan swallows.

“Did you mean that, earlier? About how I’ll—catch up?”

“Halloween’s over five months away, Ryan. You tell me. I don’t know how Sara pitched this to you initially, but I was kind of hoping you’d stick around.”

Ryan sighs, rubbing at his eyes with both hands. “I feel like the rat from Charlotte’s Web. You know, the one who’s running around the fair cramming all the food in his mouth and it’s, like, the best day of his fuckin’ rat life—”

“Templeton,” Shane says.

“Yeah, sure. He’s in heaven, right, until he eats himself sick, and it turns out he’s just a greedy fuck.”

“A fair is a veritable smorgasbord, orgasbord!” Sara chimes in off-key. Shane can’t help but notice that she’s letting him do the heavy lifting here, but maybe she’s done her share of the work already just by getting Ryan in the door. Or maybe she just thinks Ryan needs this to come from Shane.

“I’ve seen you eat In-N-Out and I’ve got to say the comparison is apt. But what’s your point, dude?” Shane asks.

“My point is that I feel like I’m being greedy, wanting all of this,” Ryan says. “For one night it’s okay, that’s a thing people can have if they’re lucky. But for longer, for a _real_ _thing_ …I don’t know how to have that.”

“I bet we can all figure out how to have that together. If you want it. This was logistically complicated and we did pretty well, didn’t we?” Shane points out.

“Straight-up _killed it_ ,” Sara crows, holding up her hands for high fives. When Ryan reaches out to high-five her, she doesn’t let his hand go. Her face goes all soft, looking at him with such care that Shane could hug her. “It’s not gluttony to let yourself be happy, Ryan. It’s okay to want things.”

“You’re so wise, Sara,” Shane says. “Like an ancient tree goddess.”

“I wonder if I’m fruit-bearing.”

“God, don’t let your mom hear you say that.”

“What do you think, should we let Ryan pluck me later?”

They’re joking together, pulling Ryan out of his head with practiced accuracy, and it’s working. He laughs into the air at that, head thrown back with genuine delight, and then pastes himself at Shane’s side.

“Happy birthday,” Ryan says. He could be saying it from his desk at work, from the tone of his voice, but his mouth is very close to Shane’s and Shane can feel the warmth of him at his hip, thinking about getting hard again. “I, this was so. I’ve...”

“It’s okay, man,” Shane says with a quiet laugh. “You don’t have to tell me, I know all about it.”

“Can I think about it? I’m—I might, but. I need to think about it for a while.”

Ryan is like this sometimes; he needs to sit with things until he’s run through them from every angle like one of his dumb cases, to get used to the shape of them and suss out every possible wrinkle. Shane knows already that Ryan will be back in his bed, that Ryan isn’t going anywhere, that they’ll have Halloween—and more besides, birthdays and Christmases Ryan won’t know how to explain to his parents, and all the random, ordinary, non-special days in between too.

He can tell because Ryan’s got the same look on his face that he was wearing when he arrived tonight with the sweaty champagne bottle, the look he wears over the threshold of every “haunted” house: uncertain but determined. Ryan didn’t become an executive producer at one of the top media companies in the world at twenty-seven by accident of fate. He made it happen for himself, entirely by doing things that scared him shitless.

That’s the kind of track record Shane would place a bet on, if he was a betting man. He likes those odds.

Sara’s on her phone, ordering them Chinese food from Postmates. Ryan drags himself up to lurk over her shoulder, still naked as the day he was born and completely unconcerned about it, already in the process of making this part of his life even if he doesn’t know it yet.

“No, I want the chow mein,” Ryan says.  “Oh, and hot and sour soup. And crab rangoon. I’ve burned a lot of calories tonight, gotta refill the tank.”

“Oh what a ratly feast!” Shane says, his very best Templeton impression.

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan says in a way that really means “I love you,” and probably has for some time. Shane doesn’t need a decoder ring to pick out the affectionate exasperation dripping off it.

“Yeah, shut up, Shane!” Sara says, piling on with abject glee, and Shane realizes he’s never going to win an argument again, maybe not ever. Not for the rest of his life.

“Oh no, I’ve miscalculated,” he says, while Sara and Ryan cackle against each other.

He curls one of his hands around Sara’s narrow, bony ankle, easily surrounding her with the span of his hand. With his other he reaches out for Ryan’s wrist and circles that too, feeling Ryan’s pulse suddenly faster under his fingers. He’s got everything he wants, everything that’s for _him_ , right where he can touch.

Thirty-two is looking pretty good.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He’s just very tall!” Ryan blurts out, louder than he means to. “And infuriating, and he has hair, and he’s tall.”
> 
> “You said tall twice,” Sara says. Her tone’s still light but she’s looking at him more closely now, her yogurt all but abandoned. 
> 
> “Well, he _is_ tall twice.”
> 
> Ryan’s sure he’s said too much. He’s all but certain he’s said something terribly revealing, and he doesn’t understand why Sara doesn’t look madder about the fact that he’s obliquely admitted to being attracted to her very tall, hair-having boyfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this house we love and respect flashbacks. We’ve been in Shane’s head this whole time, and I wanted to get a new perspective. I keep intending to be done with this fic, guys, and then something new pops up to eat away at me until I write it down.

*

_February 2018._

Ryan doesn’t know what he’s done wrong.

They don’t have a fight. Ryan doesn’t call Shane out for his pigheaded small-mindedness re: ghosts, at least not any more belligerently than usual. Nobody insults anybody’s mother or girlfriend or endless parade of plaid flannel shirts.

Shane just…fades away on him. Not so anyone else would notice, maybe, but Ryan notices.

He can’t make any sense of it. In January they’re fine, normal, all systems go, and in February they’re _different_. Shane’s polite, friendly even, but the casual familiarity is gone. One day their hands brush when Ryan passes Shane a stapler and Shane recoils like he’s grabbed the handle of a hot pan. He’s always making excuses to leave rooms that Ryan is in, which is awkward when you film a show together.

Ryan knows he can be a lot, that he can be more than some people are willing to put up with, but Shane always seemed perfectly content to put up with him before. They were close, he’d thought. Certainly he’d given Shane no reason to be actively disgusted by him. Yes, sometimes he goes a little too long without washing his hair and sometimes he talks Shane’s ear off about basketball and sometimes he rubs his belly and groans after he eats a big meal, but these things have always been true.

It’s not like he can simply ask Shane what’s wrong. Men don’t talk like that; they don’t bro down with a couple of brewskis and talk about hurt feelings—at least not the men Ryan knows. He suspects Shane might be adept at a conversation like that, but Ryan wouldn’t even know where to start. He doesn’t know how, and instead of bucking up and muddling through he decides instead to stew about it.

*

So he stews. Ryan’s basically human _pozole_ by the time they fly to Savannah to film their stretch of three eps in late March. Shane’s so awkward with him, so stilted and uncomfortable, that Ryan’s considering whether he’s going to have to commit a small piece of light murder.

Prison would suck, but it would bring him a lot of narrative satisfaction. And also regular satisfaction, if Shane’s going to keep being _like this_.

“I saw it,” Ryan insists. “It was a ghost, Shane. It was either a full-bodied apparition, or an actual person followed us down into that basement. I saw it with my own eyeballs. I can’t believe you fuckin’ got right in the shot like that.”

“Convenient,” Shane says. “Convenient that the one time you see something, I’m in your shot and you don’t have proof.”

“I know what I saw, asshole. Do I ever— _ever_ —say I actually saw a ghost? Is that a thing I usually do?”

“Hm.”

“What about the footsteps in the attic? What about the dog? You heard those things too! You have ears!”

“Yeah, and I think they were a person with a dog.” Shane’s voice is Sauv Blanc-dry and unimpressed. This is what drives Ryan crazy—when he’s got perfectly good evidence for once and Shane switches gears seamlessly from “there’s no evidence” to “I don’t buy your evidence.” He shifts the goalposts so Ryan doesn’t have a hope in hell of scoring a point.

Later that night when Shane sees their hotel room, his face falls. Ryan actually watches it crumple in on itself, like his nose is trying to invert. His mouth twists in distaste and Ryan feels somehow _embarrassed_ , like he’s done something wrong, like he planned this.

“They didn’t have any doubles available,” Ryan says by way of pre-emptive apology.

“Can’t we…can I get a pullout couch or something?”

“You can call down and ask if you want.”

They always book through discount websites and don’t always have the option to pick between doubles or a queen, and they save a lot of money by taking whatever the hotel happens to have better inventory of that night. Ryan doesn’t know what the hell Shane’s problem is. This is standard operating procedure by now.

“It’s fine. It’s a small bed, is all,” Shane says, looking at it dubiously. It’s a perfectly normal-sized queen bed. They’ve shared smaller quarters than this ten times over. The year previous he’d crawled into the world’s tiniest bed with Ryan at the Lizzie Bordon House without a single complaint, had woken up with their feet tangled together in a mess of sweaty sheets and merely laughed sleepily at Ryan’s flustered sputtering apologies.

When the time comes to change into their pajamas, Shane heads for the bathroom. He doesn’t usually bother—Ryan’s caught more glimpses of his hipbones and knobbly spine and pale legs than he can bear to think about right now—but this time Shane disappears into the bathroom and pulls the door shut tight behind him. There’s nothing wrong with wanting privacy, Ryan reasons. It doesn’t necessarily _mean_ anything.

They crawl into bed. Ryan can already tell he’s in for a restless night; between the _seeing an actual ghost_ thing and the Shane thing his brain’s stuffed full, in that way that suggests insomnia will be his bedfellow tonight as well.

Shane’s phone gets a text; he reaches for it and, upon reading it, goes fire-engine red. He busts out in a coughing fit.

“Everything okay? You need some water?”

“Fine,” Shane wheezes out, slamming his phone onto the bed screen-side down.

“Sara send you something saucy?” Ryan asks, waggling his eyebrows in an attempt to lighten the mood. “No sexting in the ghoul bed, please.”

“Definitely not,” Shane says, laughing, but the laugh is strange and high-pitched and forced. It’s possible, Ryan thinks, that Shane is lying through his teeth. The thought that Sara might have actually sent Shane something hot while he lies in bed next to Ryan, that Shane might even be a little turned on right now and embarrassed about it, makes Ryan light-headed.

“Oh shit, really?” Ryan asks, turning on his side. This, at least, he knows how to do. Good-humored ribbing about a bud’s sex life is safely within the realm of his lived experience. “Good for you, man. Keepin’ it fresh.”

“No,” Shane says firmly. “Nothing’s…fresh, don’t—why would you—ugh. I should call her, though. Say goodnight.”

He’s up and out of the bed like a shot, slipping his shoes on, grabbing his wallet and a room key. This close to April it’s warm enough in Georgia that he doesn’t need a jacket, but he grabs his on the way out the door anyway, holding it awkwardly in front of himself. Or maybe Ryan’s imagining things.

“You can say goodnight to her here, I won’t listen,” Ryan says, but Shane’s already out the door with a backwards wave of his hand like he can’t stand to be in the room with Ryan for one more second.

Ryan has a sinking feeling that this is about the crush. _His_ crush. His crush _on Shane_ , which he thought he’d been doing a pretty damn good job concealing. Current levels of interpersonal discomfort suggest this may not be the case. It’s the only explanation he can come up with for why Shane’s suddenly freezing him out like this.

Ryan had freaked out about it, when he’d first recognized the crush for what it was. For a long time he convinced himself it was a strange manifestation of hero-worship, that he looked up to Shane and respected his comedic chops and his chill charisma. And that isn’t _untrue_. It just turns out Ryan also respects the hell out of Shane’s hair when it dries floofy, and his forearms when he rolls his sleeves to the elbows, and the obvious bulge that’s sometimes evident in those army green chinos. Whoops.

Shane’s the very definition of off-limits: in a long-term relationship with a woman, herself one of Ryan’s good friends. He’s a co-worker, the closest one Ryan’s got. Ryan would never act on it, not ever, and so he didn’t think there was any harm in appreciating from a (close) distance.

Evidently there is some harm in it, because Shane won’t look him in the eye.

Ryan waits up for a little while, the insomnia nagging at him, but eventually he turns off the light and falls asleep. Shane must come back, because he’s there the next morning, but Ryan never hears him slip in.

*

The show-endangering vibe in Savannah is more than Ryan can take. He decides to go straight to the source. Then he decides he’s still too chickenshit for that, and he goes to the source’s source instead, to ask some pointed questions and try to figure out what the source might be thinking.

Ryan happens to know that Shane has a meeting about Ruining History at ten, and that’s about the same time Sara always grabs a mid-morning snack. He lurks in the canteen until Sara comes in, and then he corners her when she’s filling up a mug with yogurt and granola.

“Hey, Sara, can we…can I talk to you for a sec?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

She’s distracted, trying to get exactly the right ratio of yogurt to granola. She keeps putting in a little too much of one, adding a little more of the other, and then overcorrecting and starting all over again. Ryan watches as the mug slowly but surely fills up to the brim.

“It’s about,” and he looks around then, to make sure nobody’s within earshot, “Shane.”

“What about him?” she asks, taking a little off the top and sticking her spoon in her mouth. “Is he sleep-farting again? Because I thought I noticed that the other day, but he blamed the cat, and I _so_ don’t think it was the cat.”

“No, he’s not—well, maybe, I guess, but that’s not—”

She merely looks at him, one magnificent eyebrow cocked. They both have the best fucking eyebrows, they’re an eyebrow power couple, and Ryan thinks it’s really not fair for one household to hog all the good eyebrow juju. Like, damn, leave some for the rest of us.

“What’s got you all stammery and sweaty?” she asks, and her gaze is a little sharper than he’d prefer.

“Does he, uh. Has he been talking about me?” 

“Talking about you? What would he be saying?” Sara plays with a lock of hair behind her ear, twisting a curl around her finger. It’s a nervous habit Ryan recognizes, one that usually only comes out when she’s about to film.

“I don’t know. If he’s mad at me, I guess. He’s been strange lately, but only with me. Kind of curt, and…off. I’m wondering if I did something wrong.”

Her face falls. “Oh. I’m sure he’s not mad at you, Ryan. I’m, I’m _sure_.”

“Why, did he say something?”

“Shane says a lot of things,” Sara says. Her lip twitches and she bites down on it, like she’s fighting to keep her face neutral. Ryan’s momentarily distracted by the press of her teeth to her bottom lip, the little dent left behind. “Real chatterbox, that boy. Lotta…lotta words.”

“Please, Sar.”

Her face falls further still, all the way into conflicted dismay.

“Listen, it’s not my place to say,” she says. “Like, it’s not—I mean, it’s not _not_ my business, but. You should ask him.”

Ryan doesn’t understand that at all. He can’t blame her for taking her boyfriend’s side, of course, but he doesn’t get how something could be her business and yet not something she can choose to share with him. Surely it’s one or the other.

“Can you confirm if something is right or not?” he asks, and she gives a noncommittal one-shouldered shrug. 

What he has to figure out now is how to find out if Shane knows Ryan’s got a crush on him without revealing said crush to Shane’s girlfriend and ruining absolutely everything. It’s a delicate thing, and Ryan’s not great with delicate. Emotionally he’s a bull in a china shop.

“Is it possible he’s found out a thing about me and he’s upset by it?”

“Ooh, what thing?” Sara asks, leaning forward in her chair, tucking her head in close to his. “You can tell me, Ryan. I’m very discreet.”

He laughs then, right in her face, because _discreet_ is not a word that springs to mind when he thinks of Sara. Creative, passionate, funny, kind, a bit capricious: yes. Discreet? No.

“Just last month ago you announced to the entire office that your new—” and he drops his voice to a hiss again “— _vibrator_ was out for delivery!”

That had been a memorably trying day. He’d gotten hard at his desk thinking about Sara and her new toy, about Shane using it on her, maybe, and he’d had to sit there watching the tips of Shane’s ears go red and wondering if he was thinking about the same thing. Ryan had only narrowly resisted jerking off in the bathroom, and even then it was only because he was concerned about the real possibility of running into Shane trying to do the same thing.

She snorts. “Yeah, well, it had been backordered. It was a big day for me. Seriously, tell me your thing.”

“It’s not a thing.”

“You’re the one who called it a thing first,” Sara points out. “Are you dying of a terminal illness?”

“What? Jesus Christ. No, I’m not _dying_. You think there’s a scenario where I’m dying and I’m not putting a big countdown clock on Shane’s work laptop that reads ‘X DAYS UNTIL RYAN HAUNTS YOU’?”

“Are you ending the show?”

“No, of course not, I—he’s just very tall!” Ryan blurts out, louder than he means to. “And infuriating, and he has hair, and he’s _tall_.”

“You said tall twice,” she says. Her tone’s still light but she’s looking at him more closely now, her yogurt all but abandoned.

“Well, he _is_ tall twice.”

Ryan’s sure he’s said too much. He’s pretty sure he’s said something terribly revealing, and he doesn’t understand why Sara doesn’t look madder about the fact that he’s obliquely admitted to being attracted to her very tall, hair-having boyfriend. Maybe she’s too relieved he’s not dying.

“Oh Ryan,” she says, sitting back in her chair, crossing one knee over the other slowly like she’s Sharon Stone or something. Ryan tries not to look at her leg where her mid-calf skirt has ridden up. “I can’t believe it’s my lot in life to collect lovable idiots about my person. I feel like the tuppence-a-bag lady from Mary Poppins, only instead of pigeons it’s idiots. It’s idiots all around me, pecking at the ground with their dumb beaks, not cooing at each other when they _could be cooing_.”

“Welp, this was a mistake,” Ryan says. “Thanks, good talk, I—”

He gets up as if to leave and Sara grabs him by the wrist, keeping him there.

“He feels the same way,” she says. “He goes nuts for it, actually. When we talk about you.”

“Talk about—” he starts, but she gives him a hot look, a _new_ look, up from under her eyelashes.  She looks like a whole different person when she looks at him like that. He pulls his arm away, surprised, feeling rather like it’s breaking Shane’s trust to be the recipient of a look like that from her.

“You know,” she says, “in bed.”

*

Another person might blush, saying that sort of thing out loud. Ryan blushes to _hear_ it. Sara looks fairly unaffected, though. She reaches for her snack again.

“How can you sit there and eat yogurt at a time like this?”

“If I don’t eat it fast the granola goes all soft and mushy and then it’s ruined.” She scrapes at the bottom of the mug. “A few months ago, I had a dream about us.”

“Us.”

“You and me and the—what do you call him? The big guy,” she confirms. “All together. Just a big sexy pile of sex. It was a nice dream. Vivid.”

Ryan can hear his heartbeat in his ears. He can imagine how this is the sort of thing that might happen to some people—he bets it happens a lot to Idris Elba, for example—but it’s not something that happens to him. This is not something that happens to him at work on a Tuesday.

“Anyway, I told him about the dream, but for a while I didn’t tell him it was you giving him the goods,” she goes on. “I thought it might get weird.”

“What’s _the goods_ —” Ryan starts, his voice cracking on the end of _goods_. Sara smiles a fond smile, staring off into the middle distance as if remembering.

“But last month my curiosity got the best of me. I told him, and he—well. The results were extremely impressive.” She waggles her spectacular eyebrows and Ryan feels his face going hotter still. “I told him to talk to you about it but he decided to try the avoid-and-ignore tactic instead, which seems to be going about as well as I said it would.”

“The bed,” Ryan says faintly. “In Savannah he was so squirrelly about the bed.”

“That’s because,” Sara says emphatically, pointing her spoon at him, “he was thinking about fucking you through it and all the way down to the floorboards, and then through the floor to the floor below _that_.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he told me, stupid. He called me all stressed out about it and I talked him off in the bathroom of the 7-11 around the corner from your hotel.”

That’s enough for Ryan. He and Sara have never talked about anything saucier than Ben Franklin’s likely attendance at a sex party. One time he blushed telling her he liked her hair down. He emphatically can’t, he _cannot_ sit here and listen to her talking about him getting dicked down by her boyfriend like it’s no big deal. It’s a big deal. The biggest.

He’s glad Shane’s not mad at him, obviously. He just gets the uneasy feeling Shane will be mad at him now, if he finds out that Sara looked at Ryan like that and spilled his biggest secret.

And Ryan doesn’t _understand_. He doesn’t know why Sara would tell him in the first place, would reveal this deeply personal thing when there’s nothing Ryan can do about it. Sara doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, but this strikes Ryan as a very specific sort of torture: to hear and know and not touch.

*

The problem now is that Ryan’s got to try to avoid not one but _two_ of his best friends while at work, which is not easy.

It’s surprisingly difficult to avoid Shane, considering that Shane is also trying to avoid Ryan. Ryan would’ve thought that would make it easier, the whole mutual avoiding process, but they keep running into each other in unusual places while trying to _not_ run into each other in the usual ones. Ryan starts going to the Starbucks around the block from the office to avoid the canteen, which works fine for a few days until one morning he’s waiting for his flat white and he hears the barista announce, “Shame? Grande black coffee for Shame?”

_You’ve gotta be kidding me_ , Ryan thinks as his heart sinks into his stomach and Shane steps up to the counter for his coffee. His cup’s got SHAME scrawled in big black letters across the side, which Ryan feels is a little on the nose. Ryan looks down at it and then back up to Shane, whose face has fallen into a complicated, sheepish expression.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Ryan says. He can’t quite make himself look Shane in the eye. Every time he tries he hears Sara’s voice in his head, _he goes nuts for it, actually_ , and he can feel his face reddening as his gaze skitters away.

“I like the coffee here,” Shane says, monotone and sleepy. Ryan tries not to think about that, about how he knows so well how Shane’s voice sounds on the morning, scratchy and low.  “I like how it’s unnecessarily expensive and you get to stand in line like an animal with twenty other people for half an hour to get it.”

“I also like that,” Ryan says, shifting from foot to foot. “Coincidence.”

“Caramel macchiato for Sara?” the barista asks, and Shane steps back up with a flick of his hand to get her attention. Sara’s name is spelled wrong on the cup too, S-A-R-A-H, and Ryan knows that will drive her crazy. He opens his mouth to say as much to Shane, but the stricken, shouty voice in his head tells him the topic of Sara is off-limits and he slams his mouth shut again.

“She’s in the bathroom,” Shane says, probably assuming Ryan was going to ask where she was, and Ryan starts to panic. If he doesn’t remove himself from this situation soon Sara will rejoin them, and then she’ll look at Ryan with her face and possibly even say words. Under no circumstances can Ryan allow the three of them to be in the same place at the same time until he’s gotten this under control.

“Tall flat white for Ryan?”

Oh thank god. Ryan grabs for his drink, almost spilling it in his haste. Shane shoots him a funny look.

“Well, I’m…stuff to do, I’ll see you at work, we’ve got that meeting later so, uh.”

“I won’t forget,” Shane says. He’s not looking at Ryan, he’s craning his neck toward the back of the store to see if Sara’s on her way back, and Ryan takes the opportunity to start backing out of the store. After only narrowly avoiding two different people and almost sending himself sprawling, he turns and starts to powerwalk out of the store.

“Oh, hey, Ry—” he hears Sara’s voice ring out behind him, but he’s already out the door, dodging incoming patrons as he goes.

*

As difficult as avoiding Shane is proving to be, avoiding Sara’s next to impossible. That’s because unlike Shane she seems to be going out of her way to put herself in Ryan’s path, where he can’t ignore her.

And it’s difficult enough already, without seeing her all the time. Ryan already can’t stop thinking about her dream, the one she mentioned, and what might have happened in it, and what exactly Shane might have said when she told him about it. She’d said the results were “impressive.” Ryan has only the faintest glimmer of a clue about what she might have meant by that, but it’s keeping him up at night imagining it anyway.

Here’s the truth: thinking about Shane and Sara together keeps him up at night a lot, and it has done for months. Shane’s the one he sees all the time and so Shane’s the…the focus of it, mostly, but Ryan thinks about both of them, together and apart. He feels extremely gross about it, and that’s kept it under control for a long time, but now the bottle’s come uncorked and it’s threatening to spill out all over the place where anyone might see.

When he sees Sara he thinks again about what she said, and then visions of various erotic acts dance behind his eyeballs and he gets at least half-hard in his pants. It’s a terrible thing to happen at work, and the idea of it happening in front of _Shane_ at work haunts him.

It’s like Sara knows and she’s going out of her way to provoke him, because suddenly she’s around every corner. It’s just—it’s too many erections at work. Ryan simply cannot keep excusing himself from meetings like this, clutching various binders and backpacks and hoodies in front of his person.

Ryan’s still a little shaken up from the Starbucks run-in when Sara corners him in the props closet. He’s in there because Freddie had asked him to have a look around for “her favorite pirate hat, the one with the longass dreads,” as if Ryan should know what that means. They work in a weird office.

It’s only when he hears the door open and click shut behind him that it occurs to him that it might’ve been a trap the whole time. He’s never actually _seen_ a pirate hat with dreads in here, and he once filmed a whole Ruining History episode about pirates.

Ryan’s shoulders go up most of the way to his ears in defensiveness. He doesn’t have to turn around to know who it is.

Sure enough: “I wish you would stop avoiding us,” Sara says softly behind him. “This doesn’t have to be a problem.”

He whips around.

“In what universe is it not a problem, Sara? Do you know how, how much I’ve thought about, and how awful is to want what I can’t—”

She’s standing there, back against the closed door, watching him as if he’s a scared dog that might bite her if she comes any closer. “I do know, actually.”

“I keep thinking about your dream,” he confesses, and unburdening himself of the shame of that particular secret makes him feel lighter. “And what it would, um. What it would be like.”

“Same,” she says with a shrug.

“What…” he starts, and then he shakes his head. He can’t ask. It’s not his business, it’s too personal, and knowing will make his life more difficult than not knowing. But Sara smiles, intuiting what he was going to ask, not letting him get away with pretending not to be curious.

“We were at some haunted house, I don’t know where, I didn’t recognize it,” she says. “Probably my brain made it up. They all look the same, you know, really dismal and dirty and gross.”

“Oh, I know,” Ryan says.

“And,” she laughs, remembering, “and Shane saw a ghost, can you believe that? He saw a ghost and he got freaked out, and you were laughing at him and giving him shit about how the tables had turned, and—”

“I’m already turned on just from this,” Ryan jokes, because jokes are the safest place for him now.

“I thought you’d like that part. Anyway, in the dream I said—I said, ‘Ryan, he’s scared, why don’t you make him feel better? Why don’t you give me something better to look at than dusty old curtains?’”

She swallows hard, and the palm of her hand finds the wood of the door at her back. “And you…slid to your knees like you do it all the time, and you…you know.”

“I hope the cameras weren’t rolling.” He’s doing everything in his power to keep this light, but he can feel it snowballing out of his control.

“He’s not always that loud, but in the dream he was _loud_ ,” she says. “He kept moaning your name, _Ryan, Ryan,_ and then he would look over at me where I was on this nearby chair, my panties pulled to the side…”

Her cheeks are flushed now, Ryan can see it even in the dim light of the props closet. He knows when a woman’s turned on and he can tell that Sara is now. He’s hot all over with that knowledge, and also uncomfortably aware that this is inappropriate for several reasons, not least of all because _panties_ is a real creepy word.

“Sar, this isn’t—”

“And then you pulled off him,” she says, blunt, and her other hand flies up to her hair to wind in a curl. “Your mouth was all…all red and swollen, and you said, ‘Sara, are you gonna make me do this all by myself? He’s a lot to handle,’ and I slid down on the floor next to you.”

Ryan’s never had a threesome himself, but he’s not some rube. He’s heard his friends recount stories and then automatically assumed them to be half-lies. He’s seen them in porn, but it’s hard to find good videos with two men and one woman, though god knows he’s tried—and anyway it’s too mechanical, too scripted. None of that’s as vivid as Sara’s words are now.

“And then you fucked him,” she continues, not waiting for his reply, which is good because the power of speech has mostly left him. “There was this old bed with a massive iron headboard, someone was probably murdered in it or something, I don’t know. He took it so good, Ry, he begged for it, and then you looked over at me and you said, _what’re you doing all the way over there, baby_?”

It doesn’t quite sound like something Ryan would say, but he knows how dreams can be.  The rest of it doesn’t sound like him either, at least not the him that he presents to the world, but it’s uncannily close to the things he thinks about sometimes.

“That’s. Wow.”

“Is that something you might want? Because it’s something he wants. When I told him about it, when I told him it was you, he c—he came so hard.”

Her palm is inching along the door, back toward her body in a slow creep. It tangles in the folds of her dress, and then she presses the heel of her hand against herself through the fabric with a shudder.

Ryan shudders too, but that’s it, that’s the line, and he has to shut it down. The talk was bad enough, but this is _disloyal._ Not cheating exactly, but he’d still be horrified and ashamed if someone caught them, which is enough to tell him it’s wrong.

“That’s enough,” he says, and his voice isn’t as firm as he might wish. He’s hard in his pants, and he can practically smell that she’s wet. He wants to go to his knees for her right now, in this gross walk-in closet. He wants to find Shane and drag him in here with them. However, both of those things being impossible, he has to shut it down.

Sara startles and comes back to herself. She pulls her hand away, hitting it on the doorknob hard in her hurry and wincing at the pain.

“I’m really asking,” she says.

“Yes, it’s something I might want,” Ryan says. It feels liberating to say it out loud. He’s terrified, he’s turned on, he’s thrilled, he’s relieved.

“Okay.” She nods and adjusts her dress around herself primly, and Ryan looks away to give her privacy. “Let me just, I have an idea. Let me work on him. Don’t be so sure you can’t have it.”

And then she’s through the door and gone. Ryan stays in the closet a long time, which sounds like a metaphor but isn’t. He’s too full of adrenaline to move, and too turned on to trust what might come out of his mouth.

He spends a little more time half-heartedly searching for the pirate hat, the one he’s pretty sure doesn’t exist, and then he pops a squat on the floor of the closet underneath five sparkly prom dresses from Amazon and breathes.

*

April turns into May, and all at once it starts to feel like summer in L.A.

Summer for Ryan, that is, because some of his Buzzfeed coworkers seem to feel that anything above sixty is shorts weather—and he pities them, he does. They still aren’t used to living somewhere where it’s nice all year round, where you don’t have to settle for scraps and call it warm. It’s not almost-summer until the temperature gauge cracks 75 for the first time, which it does on Saturday, May 6.

He gets a group text from Shane that morning, probably Sara’s doing:

**Shane** : Pool’s open at the complex! BF pool party my place 2 pm sharp. Bring beer. No RSVPs necessary, just drop by!

Sounds good to Ryan. If it’s a BuzzFeed party there’ll be plenty of buffers, other people to hang out with if things are uncomfortable. At the very least he can get drunk.

At 1:30 he gets his board shorts on. Then, looking at himself critically in the mirror, he rethinks. Ryan roots around in his closet until he finds the swim shorts Roland got him as a joke a couple of years ago. They’re not Try Guys levels of obscene but they’re, you know, _short_. Mid-thigh, tighter than his other ones, and covered in a print of colorful beach umbrellas. He’d crammed them in the back of his closet and forgotten about them, but today feels like a day for showing off. Who’s laughing now, _Roland_?

By the time he’s rolling up to Shane and Sara’s apartment complex in tiny shorts and a tank top, though, he’s overthinking it. It’s out of character for him, and Shane will wonder what’s up, and Sara will _know_ what’s up. He’s playing with fire here; nothing’s been settled, nothing decided. Probably people will laugh at him.

When he strips off his tank top and wriggles out of his basketball shorts, the ones he threw on so he could grab some beer at the grocery without attracting unwanted attention, nobody laughs. Garrett shouts “Sky’s out, thighs out!” at him from his inner tube and Joyce tries to stick a dollar bill down the side of the waistband, but that’s it. Ryan cracks open a cold one and stands by the pool to slick on sunscreen.

He’s doing his arms when he looks up and Shane’s watching from the pool. Shane is laid out on one of those inflatable floating lounge chairs—too tall for it really, it’s a wonder he doesn’t counterbalance and go flying into the water—and he’s sipping some fruity concoction. His nose is already bright pink from sun, despite the massive straw hat he’s wearing.

Shane opens his mouth to say something to Ryan, probably about the trunks, and then he closes it again like he’s thought better of it. Ryan looks back, grateful for the sunglasses that are shielding his own eyes from view.

“Let me get your back.”

Sara’s there—out of nowhere, where did she even come from?—with a big platter of snacks. She sets the platter on a table, where at least five ravenous BuzzFeed employees immediately descend on it like a plague of locusts.

“What?” Ryan asks. He’s rendered stupid by her sudden appearance and by the low-coverage swimsuit she’s wearing, yellow with hot pink polka dots. It’s like that song, the one about the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini, and his throat’s dry and his tongue’s huge in his mouth.

She holds out her hand impatiently for the tube of sunscreen. “Your back, stupid. It’ll burn. Turn around.”

He does so, because he doesn’t have a good reason to tell her no. He jumps when she squirts the cold sunscreen directly on his back, at the borderline obscene noise the bottle makes when it takes in air. Sara laughs at his reaction or at Shane’s, which he can’t see.

“Is he still watching?” he asks Sara quietly through gritted teeth as she starts to spread the sunscreen around his back more slowly than he thinks is necessary.

“Yep,” she says. “He almost fell off his raft. Don’t flex so much, you’re going to give him a heart attack. He’ll be thirty-two in ten days, you know, and his cardiovascular fitness is only so-so.”

Her hands are all over his back, small and capable, rubbing in the sunscreen. Now that it’s rubbed in he can feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders and the warmth of Shane’s eyes on his back, following Sara’s fingers.

“Head down,” she commands. “I need to get the back of your neck.”

He snaps his head down obediently. She smooths sunscreen there, her touch so light it almost tickles. Suddenly her fingers wrap around the back of his neck, firmer, like she might pick him up by his scruff.

“Ah,” he whispers. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but it’s got his attention.

“Speaking of the birthday boy,” she says, low in his ear. “Do you know what you’re getting him? Other than the vision of you in those tight little shorts, which is already _such_ a gift.”

“Lunch, maybe that new book about the CIA in Afghanistan that he won’t stop going on about,” Ryan says. “Why?”

“Lunch is good,” she says. “But I’ve got a better idea.”

Abruptly her hand leaves his neck.

“What—”

“You’re all set!” she chirps loudly, smacking him on the ass with a flourish. Then she takes the shandy from his hand and gives him a good shove, so he goes flailing into the deep end of the pool.  He can hear people laughing as he comes up for air, shaking water out of his hair.

It’s the next best thing to a cold shower, though, so he’s grateful.

*

Like Ryan suspected, it’s not too awkward; all told there are about twelve coworkers there, plenty of other people to talk to. As the afternoon drags on, they order pizza. They set up a net and play a few tipsy rounds of water polo, and then Ryan scores a lounge chair in a sunny spot by the hot tub and lies out for a nap.

He must nap for longer than he plans, because when he wakes up it’s quiet. It’s got to be after six pm, judging by the slight coolness in the air and the position of the sun. He thinks it’s the chill that’s woken him up, and then he hears Sara’s laugh and Shane’s wheeze.

“Sar, this is a public—he’s right here, you, cut it out,” Shane says, a low, quiet rumble. Ryan can tell he’s a few beers deep and feeling it from the way his attention jumps around, preventing him from forming a full sentence.

That’s enough to pique Ryan’s curiosity. He opens his eyes a slit. Shane’s in the hot tub, his back to Ryan’s lounge chair. Sara’s settled in his lap, her face tucked into his neck. All Ryan can see is the explosive curl of her hair as it dries, made even curlier than usual by the steam from the hot tub.

The rest of their coworkers are gone. The pool area’s deserted.

“Don’t be such a baby, he’s out like a light,” Sara says.

Sara must wriggle in Shane’s lap—it’s hard to see with the roil of the water—because he groans.

“You’re trouble.”

“It’s not like you wouldn’t want him to watch anyway,” she continues. “If he woke up right now, if he joined us in here, what would you do?”

She looks up then, right over Shane’s shoulder, directly at Ryan. Ryan closes his eyes the second he sees the white flash of hers, but he knows he isn’t fast enough.

“I would keel over dead,” Shane says, deadpan. He sighs and Ryan can’t take it, he has to open his eyes again, just a fraction. He has to know if what he thinks might be happening is _actually_ happening. “Which I nearly did earlier when you were rubbing your hands all over him. God almighty.”      

“You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool me,” she says. Her hands disappear from around Shane’s neck, messing in his lap, and a moment or two later he barks out a laugh.

“This isn’t sanitary, Sara. It’s also, like, illegal. If somebody comes down—”

“We booked the pool all day, we paid the fee. I won’t tell. Ryan’s asleep, _he_ won’t tell.”

Ryan watches with his own two eyeballs as Shane’s hand wraps around Sara’s neck to untie her bikini top. He almost can’t believe he’s seeing this. He should say something, he should pretend to wake up and give them time to get themselves together. They’re not a couple that’s into PDA, and Ryan can count on one hand the number of times he’s even seen them kiss.

Seeing them together like this, Sara moving slowly in Shane’s lap, leaning back a little to let Ryan see her bare chest over the bubble of the water—it’s almost too much.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Shane says under his breath.

“Tell me what you’d do if he joined us,” Sara presses. When Shane doesn’t immediately answer she stops moving, and Shane’s shoulders tremble with the effort of meeting her in stillness. Ryan’s dick twitches sympathetically in his swim shorts.

She looks up at Ryan again, and this time Ryan doesn’t bother to pretend to be asleep. He knows she knows he’s awake, and he knows she intends him to watch. Maybe it’s even integral to her getting off, to have arranged this. Ryan hates to disappoint.

She meets his gaze over the tense hunch of Shane’s shoulders, and then she blinks at him slow and careful, like she might blink at a cat to calm it down. The back of Shane’s neck is pink from the heat, the hair there wet and curling, and Ryan has a flustered moment where he wishes he was sitting where Sara is, feeling it under his fingers. He wants to pull Sara down around himself, and he wants to shift against the hardness of Shane under him, and it’s confusing to not know which he wants more.  

“I’d want to watch you two together,” Shane says at last, and it’s been so long that Ryan almost forgot Sara asked him a question. “I’d want to watch you ride him until you both came, and then after you—I’d—his mouth…”

“I wonder if he’s ever sucked dick before,” Sara speculates. “I bet not. You’re a lot for a first time, but he’d try so hard to make you feel good, wouldn’t he?”

“Babe, if you don’t move I’m gonna lose it.”

She shifts against him again, slow, eyes on Ryan the whole time. The steam’s rising off the water in waves, like a pot set on the stove to boil. Ryan can feel the blood in his veins boiling to match, the hot, sluggish churn inside. It’s so hard to stay still, but if he moves Shane will hear the rustle of his shorts and know. At this point it wouldn’t be the end of the world, probably, but it isn’t how he’d choose to have it go down.

“I think he’d like it,” she says, and she smiles at Ryan when she says it, almost comforting. “You know how pleased he gets when he makes you laugh. Imagine how he’d feel about making you come.”

Shane grunts. His hands disappear under the surface, maybe to grasp firmly at Sara’s hips, maybe to find her clit. Either way she gasps and her movement changes from a slow up-and-down to a quick grind.

“Sar—”

“You gonna come for me, baby? Are you going to come in me while he’s right here sleeping a few feet away? Maybe we’ll wake him up and make him clean me up after—”

She breaks off, shuddering and shivering in Shane’s lap as she comes. It must trigger something for him, because he goes rigid and makes a noise Ryan’s never heard him make before, almost metallic, like a swear got crunched up in his vocal chords trying to come out and grounded out in pieces.

It throws Ryan for a loop in the best way. He’d known already, of course; it’s not like he thought Sara was making it up. Still, hearing it from Shane’s mouth that he wants Ryan, that he wants them together, changes things. It makes them more real, and all the riskier for it.

Ryan closes his eyes again, listening to their breathing as it evens out. It’s the only way he can keep himself still and in control. He’s hard enough in his swim trunks to cut glass, so hard he knows it’ll be obvious if Shane should look over, and he starts thinking very deliberately about all the least sexy things he can imagine: overcooked broccoli, phlegm, Ted Cruz naked. The continued dominance of the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference.

“Shit,” Sara giggles. “Where’s my—where’d you throw my top?”

“Here, hang on, let me.”

“Such a gentleman,” she teases. “I should go back to the apartment and get a shower. Can you handle waking him up without being a big dumb goober about it?”

“Probably not.” Shane sounds glum about that, resigned. “But sure, you head up. I’ll be there in a few.”

There are some splashing noises then, Sara and Shane getting out of the hot tub, toweling off on the other side. The barely-perceptible sound of Sara walking away, the gate of the privacy fence creaking on her way out of the pool area.

Ryan can still hear Shane moving around not too far away, gathering up his things, toweling his hair dry, slipping flip flops on. He focuses on making his own breathing deep and steady; Shane knows what he sounds like asleep, after all.

Then there’s a hand on his bare shoulder, firm and big. 

“Hey, man, you’ve gotta get up.”

Ryan doesn’t even have to fake how startled he is. He jumps a little, as if he’s being pulled from sleep, and opens his eyes to see Shane staring down at him. Shane’s face and chest are pink, and Ryan doesn’t know if it’s because of what he’s been up to, the heat of the water, or the sunshine. 

“What time is it?” Ryan mumbles.

“Almost seven,” Shane says. “You were out for a couple of hours, but everybody’s gone, so…”

“Sorry,” Ryan apologizes, sitting up and stretching. He takes the opportunity to drape his towel around himself strategically. “I hope you didn’t stay down here on my account.”

Shane smiles. It’s the nicest smile he’s let slide Ryan’s way in a long time. His guard’s down from the beer, the sun, the orgasm, and the softness of the day peeks through. Ryan feels it all the way down to his toes. He wants to bask in it and so he does, letting himself smile up, hiding behind sleepiness to excuse the way he leans into Shane’s hand on his shoulder and hums.  

“Nah, we were enjoying ourselves, but we’re all pruney now,” he says. He squeezes Ryan’s shoulder and stands back up to his full height.

“It was a good day,” Ryan says honestly. “Thanks for having me over. It’s—I’ve missed…thanks.”

“Sure, any time.” Shane looks like he wants to say something else, and then he shakes his head. He offers Ryan a hand and pulls him off the lounger. “You’re always welcome here.”

“Am I?” Ryan asks. He wants to push his luck, to make Shane explain why he’s been distant lately, but he’s too tired. He doesn’t want to fight about it, should Shane deny it, and he thinks Sara should be here if Shane doesn’t.

“You know you are,” Shane says, but he looks a little sheepish. “Mi casa es…you know.”

“ _Nuestra_ ,” Ryan corrects. “It’s _nuestra casa_ , I think.”

Shane shakes his head, puzzled.

“ _Our_ house,” Ryan says, and he angles his chin in the direction of the apartment, where Sara’s washing Shane’s come off her thighs and maybe thinking about Ryan while she does it. Ryan’s not sure there’s a word in English or Spanish to describe _that_. The Germans probably have one, though. They’ve got a word for everything.

*

Later that night, Ryan’s nearly asleep when he gets a text from Sara. She doesn’t text him often and it makes him shift in bed with guilt to see her name pop up. He’s so sure that sneakily texting your best friend’s girl and then jerking off about it, which he absolutely does intend to do, violates some sort of ethical standard.

**Sara** : Hey you still awake?

**Ryan** : yep, what’s up

**Sara** : Can I call real quick? Wanna coordinate Operation Birthday Boy and said BB in the shower for the next nine minutes or so.

**Ryan** : ok

He says okay because he recognizes dimly that it’s better to not have a record of this that Shane might see if he were to happen to poke through Sara’s texts. That’s gross, he feels gross about the sneaking. But, he rationalizes, people go behind their friends’ back to plan birthday surprises all the time. It’s just that this is the most extreme version of that, assuming Sara’s planning what he thinks she’s planning.

His phone rings. He breathes in and out several times, and then he picks up right before it goes to voicemail.

“Hey you,” Sara says. She sounds waterlogged. Ryan wonders if she’s laying in bed too, ready to go to sleep, still smelling faintly of chlorine and sunscreen. He wonders if she and Shane went for round two. “Doing okay?”

“I’m—yeah,” Ryan says. Okay isn’t quite the word. “Sara, you’re fearless.”

She laughs. “It’s only you, what’s there to be scared of?”

Ryan knows that’s not true. He knows what Shane knows, which is that the sort of thing he thinks Sara’s about to propose can do lasting damage to relationships and friendships. It can go wrong in a hurry. He could point that out, but he’s tired of being a stick-in-the-mud.

“The sort of bacteria that thrives in hot tubs, for one. Okay, tell me about Operation Birthday Boy,” Ryan says. “But I’m telling you right now that I’m not jumping out of a cake wearing something slinky and singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President.’”

“Pity,” Sara says with a sigh. “What about wearing a giant ear of corn costume? Because—”

“No.”

“Okay, in that case I was thinking you could come over after work dressed as, like, yourself, and the three of us could have some sex.”

Ryan swallows. She’s really just—just putting that out there, then. They could be talking about the weather, or what he’ll have for dinner tomorrow.

“I’m…what if it goes badly? What if it doesn’t work?”

She goes quiet for a moment, thinking. Ryan can hear something on the other end of the line clicking, like the top of the pen. He can imagine her at her desk, sketching some freaky fifty-eyed creature to soothe her nerves, her legs tucked up under her.

“I think pretending we don’t want to is already not working,” she says.

“Oh, is that what you were doing today?” Ryan asks, as mildly as he can. “Pretending you didn’t want to?”

“Hush, you. No, I mean…it’s the wanting that changed things, Ryan. Not the talking about wanting, and not the doing. It’s already done in all the ways that count, except the fun one.”

Ryan has to acknowledge the logic in that. Shane is being weird with him. He is being weird with Shane. Running into Sara at work provokes the same physiological fear-excitement response he often finds himself experiencing on location in cursed demon houses, which is a crossing of mental wiring that he suspects will have consequences later. It’s already a mess.

“What if he doesn’t want to? I mean, I heard him, but hypothetically wanting to and, like, actually wanting to aren’t the same thing.”

“Let me take care of that,” Sara says. “I’ll talk to him. It’ll be great, Ryan, you’ll see. The best birthday present anybody’s ever gotten. Now are you sure you’re not willing to wear something saucy? Because I think a harness would be—”

“Sara.”

“With, like, a big red bow on it?”

“Sara, no.”

*

Only Sara doesn’t talk to Shane, apparently, which is how Ryan winds up on their couch ten days later, rubbing his sweaty palms on his jeans, listening to them having a doozy of a whisper-fight in the adjoining kitchen and getting closer and closer to losing his entire shit.

“…did you tell him?” Shane’s voice is quiet but stressed. He doesn’t sound panicked often, but if Ryan had to put a word to it, he’d say panicky.

“He came to me,” Sara protests. “He said you were acting weird. He wanted to know if you were  _mad_  at him.”

“Don’t you think maybe that was my call?” Shane hisses, and then there’s clinking glassware and some more stuff Ryan can’t quite make out. “ _In love—fucking fall into bed together_?”

Nobody’s been throwing the l-word around, as far as Ryan knows, and hearing it out of Shane’s mouth now makes him grip the arm of the couch in a sudden burst of fear. He and Sara have talked an awful lot about wanting these last few weeks, about sex, about intimacy, about logistics even, but not a word about _love_.

Ryan can’t stop thinking about the look on Shane’s face when he’d opened the door tonight, all done up and freshly showered: friendly, polite, confused. And then, when he finally understood what Ryan was here for, _shocked_. Shocked in a way that suggested Sara had not laid the groundwork for this evening as she’d promised to do.

That face had told Ryan what he needed to know. Hearing Shane put voice to the stakes now—that punched-out, panicked _love_ —all but confirms it. Sara’s been keeping some secrets of her own. Knowing Shane’s and Ryan’s shared propensity for overthinking things, for talking themselves into maintaining the status quo, Sara simply didn’t give them the chance.  

Ryan doesn’t know if he’s furious with her or grateful. If he’d known what was in play tonight, things so much bigger than sex, he probably wouldn’t have knocked on the door. If Shane had known why Ryan was knocking, Shane probably wouldn’t have let him in.

They’re still arguing. Ryan’s getting tired of being the voyeur, stuck on the outside looking in and guessing and wondering.

“Hey guys?” he says, inwardly cringing at how tentative he sounds. “Not to make this weirder, but you do realize I can hear everything you’re saying, right?”

There are a few beats of silence from the kitchen. He can imagine them, still as statues, communicating perfectly with their eyes. He sits still too, waiting, and then he hears the sharp exhale of Shane’s sigh.

They pop back around the corner then, clutching glasses of champagne. Sara’s got her glass in both hands as if she’s afraid she’ll drop it, and Shane’s got one in each hand. One of those is for Ryan, and he has to hold back the urge to reach out for it and down it all in one gulp.

They take each other in. Ryan’s aware that it’s the first time in a long time that they’re all three seeing each other for what they are, the full truth laid bare. It makes him feel quite naked already.

“I really can go,” Ryan offers, giving Shane an out. “I didn’t realize.”

Ryan leaves that open to interpretation. It could mean a lot of things: _I didn’t realize Sara didn’t talk to you about this. I didn’t realize you’re scared as shitless as I am. I didn’t realize you might love me, I didn’t realize that’s what this is._

Shane is sizing him up, trying to come to a decision. Ryan’s not sure if it’ll make a difference one way or the other, but he sits up a little straighter, crossing his arms over his chest in a way he hopes is nonchalant and flattering. He can’t hide his nerves, not from Shane, but he can make it clear that he’s here by choice and let the chips fall where they may.

And then Shane smiles. It’s a tentative smile out of half his mouth, so cautious that Ryan wants to kiss it off because it doesn’t look natural on him. Shane nods at Sara, and something shifts in the energy of the room.

“No, Ryan,” she says. “Please stay. As long as you still want to.”

She makes a face at him, wide-eyed and apologetic, and Ryan can’t stay mad. He’s been told he can be an unreasonable scaredy cat, and he knows firsthand that Shane can be an unbelievably stubborn butthead. He can’t blame Sara for making the most of her time caught between a rock and a hard place.

“I do,” Ryan says to Shane, because he figures Shane might like to hear it.  Shane reaches out to pass Ryan his glass of champagne. This is it, the first chance Ryan will ever have to touch Shane like he means it, with the promise of more to come. He’s no good at this sort of thing, at seductions and lingering glances and hot touches, but he lets his thumb stroke against Shane’s palm as he takes the glass.

Shane’s hand shakes, his fingers flex around his own champagne, and that’s gratifying. That’s a confidence-boost. For the first time since he got here, Ryan’s wanting takes precedence over his fear.

He _does_ want, whatever the risks, whatever the stakes.

*

The next fifteen minutes are a blur. There’s birthday toasting, Ryan remembers that. They sit on the couch, they talk, they laugh. Sara tells a story about how the LadyLike women wore modesty ponchos at work all day for a video—Ryan’s not sure what that means exactly—and how it ended with an impromptu water gun fight up on the third floor.

“I like that we work somewhere that just has water guns lying around,” Shane says.

“I’m sure it’s the Try Guys’ fault,” Ryan says. “Men Try Giving Each other Squirt Gun Enemas or something.”

Sara snickers. “Yeah, that scans.”

It’s like any old night from before, except that Shane’s got Ryan’s feet in his lap, as he might hold Sara’s. Ryan had sat down on the couch with his socked feet pulled up and to the side and Shane had surprised him by tugging one of Ryan’s ankles into the cup of his palm.

He’s not massaging, exactly, but his hand is still encircling Ryan’s ankle, pressing occasionally at a sensitive spot under the bone. His handspan’s so big he might as well be holding Ryan’s wrist, and it’s distracting enough that Ryan keeps tipping in and out of the conversation.

“—a birthday kiss,” Sara is saying, and it brings Ryan back to himself, because she’s standing up and headed their way.

“All this enema talk’s revving your engine, huh?” Shane jokes, and then Sara’s kissing him. It’s not the first time Ryan’s seen them kiss, and of course he’s seen them do a lot more than that now. But it is the first time he’s felt like he’s supposed to see.

They’re so familiar with each other, so comfortable. They kiss like they’ve kissed a million times, and possibly they have. With Shane reclining a bit and Sara kneeling beside him they’re almost on level with each other, and that snatches Ryan’s breath out of his throat. She throws her hand back to brace herself on Ryan’s knee, creating a link between the three of them with her touch.

“Ryan?” she asks expectantly, pulling out of the kiss. He flicks down to look at her hand there, on his leg, and he can feel Shane looking too.

Ryan fights back the urge to giggle. It’s both ludicrous and not, simultaneously ridiculous and _ridiculously hot_. He looks up and catches Shane’s eye, and he can tell they’re both thinking the exact same thing. That’s reassuring.

He leans in, and Shane sits up a little to meet him partway, and Sara pulls back to give them room.

“Happy birthday, man,” he says when he’s close enough to feel Shane’s breath, and it might be something of an understatement.

As a general rule, Ryan doesn’t care for first kisses. He likes all the ones that come after, once you’re comfortable and you know what to expect. The process of getting on the same page with someone, mouth-wise, is stressful.

In this case, though, he already knows Shane’s mouth about as well as he could know anyone’s in advance of actually kissing them. God knows he’s spent enough time looking at it, on camera and off. Even the pressure of having an audience isn’t too bad, the warmth of Sara’s hand on his leg an encouragement rather than a detriment.

No, in this case the problem is that the moment he has Shane’s mouth under his, Ryan’s shocked by the _degree_ to which he wants it. Impulse control’s never been one of his strongest suits, and the prospect of getting this thing he’s been denying himself is overwhelming. It’s not unlike those crazy fad diets they used to try for Test Friends videos; Ryan’s been surviving on Soylent for months, and now that he’s got a big juicy burger in front of him he can’t help but devour it.

It must show in the kiss that he’s messy and overwhelmed, that he doesn’t know what to do with this buffet of choice, because Shane pulls away. His mouth is bitten and wet, and that’s Ryan’s doing but he has no memory of making it so. He feels like a magpie, distracted by each new shiny thing, each new touch or look. Or like one of Sara’s dumb pigeons, picking wildly at seeds on the ground.

“Calm down, dude,” Shane says. “It’s not a test.”

Ryan would be embarrassed about how eager he must seem, but Shane’s started rubbing his back through his shirt, steadying him.

Shane used to do this on shoots sometimes, when Ryan would get over-amped, on those rare occasions when his fear would tip over from funny and filmable into something else. It never made it into the final cuts, but a light drumming of fingertips on his wrist, a passing hand on his elbow, a hook of his foot around Ryan’s ankle were all in the repertoire. Those used to spell safety to Ryan, and Shane’s hand on his back conveys that again now.

“Shut up,” he tells Shane. “You don’t know, I’ve wanted this...”

He leaves it unfinished, but Shane smiles up at him like he _does_ know. The devastatingly familiar crinkle of his eyes sends Ryan crashing back in for more.

The second kiss is better. It always is. Ryan relaxes into it, and Shane relaxes in return, and Sara makes a pleased little noise off to the side.

They can. They can definitely do this.

*

Later, after they’ve _done this_ , after they’ve cleaned up and eaten their weight in Chinese food and had conversations so big that Ryan’s not sure he’s ready to deal with them yet, Ryan stares at himself in the mirror.

He doesn’t feel any different. He expected that he would, but it could be any other night at Shane and Sara’s, two movies deep into a three-movie marathon, taking a break to pee and refill the popcorn bowls.

Then there’s movement out of the corner of Ryan’s eye, and his eyes flick over to meet Shane’s in the mirror. Shane’s still shirtless, so that’s different, and the appreciative way he looks Ryan up and down is new too.

“Sara?”

“Out like a light. What a champ.”

“That bed’s not big enough for three people to sleep in when one of them is you,” Ryan warns, but Shane’s already shaking his head.

“Sure it is, for a little while. We can—I’ll go buy a king-sized mattress this weekend. We can all go together and test ‘em out.”

Ryan’s insides quiver again at the seriousness of Shane’s expression, at the sureness of him. He isn’t kidding. He’s prepared to go blow five hundred bucks just to make sure Ryan feels comfortable in his bed.

“I’m sorry we surprised you with this,” Ryan says. “I didn’t exactly know it was going to be a surprise.”

“I gathered that. Sara is, well.”

“Terrifying? Machiavellian?”

“I was going to say tenacious.”

Shane runs his hand through his hair, that familiar gesture that makes Ryan want to reach out and touch it. Then he remembers he can, that he’s allowed to now, and he puts up a hand to pat down the soft, fluffy strands.

“I saw the two of you,” Ryan blurts out before he can stop himself, pulling his hand away. He can’t bear to keep it from Shane any longer. He feels gross enough about it as it is. “Not saw. Watched. In the hot tub a couple of weeks ago. She engineered it that way, I think, but it’s still…I feel not great about it.”

Shane’s eyes widen in surprise, his cheeks and neck flush, and then he shakes his head.

“I want to state for the record that I’m not the kind of person who usually has sex in communal hot tubs,” he says. “That was a, uh, special occasion.”

“Well, thanks for letting me get a better view the second time around, I guess,” Ryan says. He snickers. “Courtside. Right over home plate. Club level, first row.”

“I—oh, is this sports? Are sports metaphors a thing you have to do after you have sex with a dude?”

“They’re a thing I have to do after I have sex with _anyone_.”

It’s Ryan’s turn to laugh then. Shane crosses his arms over his bare chest, and Ryan thinks that he looks very _grown_ leaning there against the doorframe, and Ryan feels very _grown_ looking at him. He thinks perhaps it’s not kind to tell a man he looks grown on his birthday, even if he means it as a compliment, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“I’m sorry too,” Shane says with a perceptible deepening of the small lines on his forehead. “I should have told you, instead of letting things get messed up. I should have trusted you.”

“I should have taken that job at Mashable,” Ryan muses, just to watch Shane’s brow furrow further. “Kidding, obviously. This is, I mean, it was great. It’ll be great.”

And that’s a subtle but real distinction, the switch from present tense to past tense to future tense. Ryan can tell when Shane clocks it because he grins again, tiny and twitchy like he’s trying to suppress it.  

“Yes, it will be,” he says.

Ryan tries not to worry about the rest of it. He tries not to think about how tough work will be, if they do this for real. They work at a more open-minded office than most, but people will still be surprised and nosy. That’s a level of scrutiny over his personal life that Ryan’s not used to.

His family loves him, but they won’t get it. His friends love him, but they _super_ won’t get it. It’s so new, such a gulf between the person he used to be and the person he’s becoming, and the prospect of building that bridge in the public eye is scary.

If they do this (when, if, Ryan doesn’t know) it’ll be the scariest thing he’s ever done. He has this uneasy feeling that he’ll hate himself if he doesn’t try, that it would be a cowardice he couldn’t live with.

Shane’s watching him in silence now, without judgment. Shane, of all people, gets it. He’s been at Ryan’s side for a hundred scary things, a constant on camera and off.  Ryan knows Shane knows when to humor him and when to be flippant, when to go along with his fear and when to shine a light on it and take its power away. And him and Sara together, they’re formidable. They’ll be patient with him.

“Come to bed,” Shane says at last.

“I gotta brush my teeth,” Ryan says. “These pearly whites aren’t gonna maintain themselves. And if I don’t do it my dad will know somehow, and a little Spidey sense will go off in his brain and he’ll send me an e-card about cavities like it’s 1999.”

“As a person who intends to kiss you frequently and thoroughly, I commend your commitment to dental hygiene.”

Shane reaches for his own toothbrush and pulls the toothpaste out of the top drawer. He squirts toothpaste onto his brush and then passes the tube off to Ryan with a raise of his eyebrow.

It’s strange—they’ve shared hotel rooms dozens of times, crashed at each other’s’ places a dozen more, but they’ve never done _this_. They’ve never brushed their teeth next to each other at the sink, making eye contact in the mirror, Shane poking his tongue out around his toothbrush. It’s such a small thing but it feels so comfortable, so intimate, that Ryan can’t believe it’s the first time.

After the requisite two minutes they spit into the sink, one right after the other, and then Shane is pressing him against the sink’s edge for a long, minty kiss. They’re getting really good at it already, and Ryan feels the zing of it from the tips of his toes to the tips of his ears. He wonders if it’s okay that Sara’s not here. Sooner rather than later they’re all three going to need to have another long, embarrassing conversation where Ryan reveals the degree to which he has no idea what he’s doing.

“I don’t think I’ve brushed my teeth for that long in like a decade,” Shane confesses, pulling back to rub at Ryan’s jaw where a little fleck of toothpaste lingers. “You’re rubbing off on me so well already.”

“That is the idea,” Ryan says, pressing his hips closer, unable to help himself when given such a perfect assist. Shane purses his lips and shakes his head in feigned exasperation.  

“Come on,” he says. “Sara won’t mind us making out in the bathroom, but she’ll never forgive us if she wakes up without her space heaters.”

Settling into bed to one side of a sleeping Sara, Shane’s arm reaching around her from the other side to rest his hand on Ryan’s arm, Ryan thinks that it’s possible the mattress isn’t too small. Maybe they do all fit, tucked in tidy like well-cut puzzle pieces.

Maybe there’s room for him after all.

*


End file.
